When Focus Becomes a Bad Thing
Focus gets a lot of good press these days in the leadership literature. Organizational leaders are expected to be models of singular focus, driving their staff down exactly the right track with single-minded urgency and concentrating resources for maximum impact, while fending off distractions that could distract from the quest. They hear it from boards, investors and consultants, and even from their own staff.
No wonder. We operate in a world where there is more and more going on at once, and it's relentless, coming at us from every direction with increasing speed. How else to not get overwhelmed and overstretched into ineffectiveness, except by picking the best path as early as possible and sticking to it? Your competitors may be doing exactly that. How are you going to compete if you don't match or even exceed their focus?
That's how you've probably been pushed in the direction of overfocusing.
Yes, focus is an important and even critical tool for leaders. Unfocused organizations will indeed struggle to compete. But in a complex, fast-changing, competitive business environment, few leaders can afford the luxury of locking into a single path early on and sticking to it, to the exclusion of alternatives and side excursions.
The question of focus is one I had to wrestle with when I was first building an enterprise that advances global healthcare. It's a big world out there: Which country to work with? What type of partner? What sort of partnership? The challenge would have felt a lot less daunting if I had just made what might have seemed like a good choice among the many possible paths in front of us. But through trial and error I determined that we'd end up doing a lot of better by keeping many of our options open. We ultimately ended up working with nearly 30 partners in 20 countries, and in a variety of partnership types.
Now I see many of my colleagues and counterparts in global healthcare confronting these same questions. And just as I was, they're tempted to lock in early as a way of simplifying the picture. If they do, most will be making a big mistake. Success tends not to come from extreme focus, but from increased understanding of all the different options. Simply ignoring 98 percent of what's out there in the name of focus is probably not the right move. The opportunity costs could be enormous.
Sure, it's harder in some ways to execute well when you're not narrowly focused. But focus comes with cost and risk. Great managers don't try to maximize focus, they try to optimize it for a given situation and point in time. That means bringing thought and rigor to the task of weighing the costs and benefits of more focus.
Here are some of the guidelines that have helped me find the appropriate focus for different challenges:
? Treat focus as a process, not a steady state. In general, you'll want to start off in a new situation by casting a wide net, and remaining open to a variety of possibilities that can be explored, analyzed and tested. As you gain insight and experience, you can start to narrow and intensify focus on a smaller set of options, and perhaps eventually a single option. But in some cases, you may need to back off focus as well as you move forward. The key is to keep questioning what your focus should be on, and how narrowly you focus on it.
? Cultivate a multi-focal view. Yes, spreading your attention over many tasks and challenges can leave you distracted and ineffective. But an adept leader should be able to split her or his focus in a way that allows effectively managing two or three different high-priority challenges at once.
? Rotate focus. Managers often confuse having multiple objects of focus with multi-tasking. You don't have to pay attention to all your focus points at the same time. You can give each one your full focus, as intensely and for as long as required, while the others get temporary benign neglect. Just don't stay stuck on any one of them indefinitely--when things are under control with one focus point, move on to the next one, and so forth, in a continuous loop.
? Choose the right degree of focus. There's a wide spectrum of focus intensity managers can apply. Don't treat focus as binary--as if your focus had to be either a laser beam or a diffuse glow. You can give a set of goals a moderate amount of your focus, leaving you free to pay some attention to other challenges and possibilities.
? Backstop your focus. Make sure that whatever it is that isn't getting your focus can't rear up unnoticed and cause damage. Set up safeguards to monitor areas of non-focus, and make sure the processes are in place to raise the alarm and get attention if things go south.
? Delegate focus. It doesn't have to be your focus that directly drives toward a particular organizational goal. Distribute focus among your team, and help them enlist the right level and type of focus to get their part of the job done. Then you can be free to spread your focus across the whole picture.
Focus is a great way to forge ahead. Just don't let it become a set of blinders.
Transformational Business Leader in multidisciplines, Business Development Expert, Founder and CEO/CIO of Investment Funds.
7 年Hi Steve. Hope life after Hopkins is good to you. You certainly deserve the best. I live in San Diego now... left Aramco few months ago. Come visit me when your time permits. My cell is 3213012478
Blocked Pipe | Pipe Relining | Trenchless Pipe Repairs | Pipe Infiltration | Pipe Rehabilitation | Cured-in-place Pipe
7 年Excellent post, Steven!
Global Healthcare Change Agent I Transformation I Consumerism l GTM Emerging Mkts.
7 年nice article, Steven J. Thompson
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7 年wow, that post is insightful.i have learned a lot from this.your energy means a great deal to me.keep sharing to impact others.stay blessed
Chief Operating Officer, Signature Services at Penn Medicine
7 年Very thoughtful articulation of the complexity of what it means to be focused. Thank you.