Protect Your Focus, Make Better Decisions

You have probably heard about how presidents, CEOs, and other famous folk wear the same clothes daily. If not, read more here: https://bit.ly/3RVGu5P

Like your favorite childhood cartoon character, some people never change their clothes in real life. There are certainly benefits to picking a style and sticking to it, part brand consistency, part decision-making bandwidth, and part shopping ease. Sure, there will be days or events that benefit from a wardrobe change, but on average, your typical setup gets the job done.

In the same way, building operational systems and process helps you create consistency in your organizations. That consistency in formalized attributes lets you focus on chaotic and changing aspects of your role. Generally, leaders benefit when they have the bandwidth to wrestle with critical and impactful issues. At scale, consistency in organizational brand identity and user success outcomes matters. Probably more than what shirt you wear for the day unless you happen to work/live in fashion - sorry, my fashion-forward friends.?

Such decisions are tempting to focus on because the impact feels more personal and significant. I might not be able to get my lazy co-worker to help me today, but I can at least decide I good I'm going to look when I do all the work myself. In reality, the same logic causes many a leader to micro-manage. If I can't ensure our next feature is a big hit, I will ensure we are all following the dress code to the letter. Both situations focus on a data point probably outside the organization's success measures, definitely outside the root issue. We often focus on small wins, or at least small-scale controls of our environment, and bypass the big picture. We risk spending all of our decision-making energy on the fine-tuning of the day instead of the setup for the future. Is it beneficial to feel like we have some control over our own destiny? For sure. Can that come to the detriment of that same destiny? For sure.?

Building operational systems around the outcome you want to see can help focus your organizational assets toward what matters. With limited decision-making time and energy, making simple and standard what you can mean more focus on what matters. If uniform unity is essential to your brand experience, then focus on that. Sports teams all wear the same shirt for a reason. If feature deployment is more important to your brand experience, focus on that. Most folks don't care what their phone support person is wearing - except for maybe State Farm customers.?

Functional leaders create value for organizations when they standardize the critical and ignore insignificant details, allowing their teams to focus on solving significant problems. Let your team focus on how they best contribute to the organization's mission. ?