Are You Focused? The Paradox of Leadership

Understanding how and where you focus can improve your ability to devise strategies, innovate, and lead your team(s).

We live and work in a world filled with paradox and complexity. What were once thought to be nice-to-haves are now becoming the norm.

We want more flexibility and profitability. It's important to strengthen employee engagement and connect meaning and purpose and values at all levels yet we operate in a hybrid work environment.

To make sense of it all, we yearn for simplicity yet there seems to be no end in sight to greater complexity and confusion.

How can you lead clearly and effectively with ever-increasing complexity and paradoxical business in an already complex world?

Radically Human

Gary Burnison, CEO of Korn Ferry, wrote in The 5 Graces of life and leadership that leadership is a paradox: "everything starts with the leader, but it is never about the leader", and that "we need to be radically human leaders with greater self-awareness and genuine connection to others."

Daniel Goleman's bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, Why It Can Matter More Than IQ was first published in 1995 and is still as relevant today as it was then. Groundbreaking.? The Harvard Business Review called it?“a revolutionary, paradigm-shattering idea”.?? (Want more to strengthen your awareness muscle? Get my free Leader's Clarity GPS? here .)

The Triad of Awareness

Published in December 2013 in Harvard Business Review, "The Focused Leader", Goleman wrote in this article, "The primary task of leadership is to direct attention."

According to Goleman, there are three areas of focus that you as the leader needs to cultivate to be at your best, what he calls "the triad of awareness", each balanced and complimenting the other.

Focusing on Self. Emotional Intelligence begins with Self-Awareness.?It's your inner voice and your intuition, or gut feelings.?Your gut feelings are messages and sensations that something doesn't feel right.? But you also need to be aware of your emotions in order to judge the value of your intuition.

Being authentic is important to leadership.??When you are more self-aware, you become more authentic.

You're authentic when you are the same person to others as you are to yourself.

Use the power of positive thinking to help you practice?open awareness.??Open awareness allows you expand your view and to perceive what is going on around you without judgement or tuning out.? That's the hard part - suspending judgement.

Focusing on Others. This is the ability to find common ground and empathize, and to build social relationships.?There are three kinds of empathy that are important for leadership effectiveness:??cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathetic concern.

Cognitive empathy is understanding another person's perspective.?Emotional empathy is the ability to feel what someone else feels.?Empathetic concern is the ability to sense what others need from you.

Focusing on The Wider World. A leader who is outwardly focused is a good listener as well as a good questioner.?He/she is visionary and is able to freely imagine how the choices of today will play out in the future.

A focused leader is one who is in touch with her/his feelings, is aware how others see them and understands what others need from them.? He/she knows how to weed out distractions and is free of preconceptions.?

This is the opposite of Blind Spots. Most leaders I work with have them. Sometimes you need someone to point them out to you. My wife is really adept at this.

Paradexity, The Convergence of Paradox and Complexity

Anthony Howard of the Confidere Group wrote in the Journal of Management Development (Vol 29 number 3, April 2010) that we live in a time of "Paradexity, The convergence of paradox and complexity".

Now more than ever, we live

in a world of complexity and paradox never before imagined.

Howard writes that we live with a new set of paradigms - the emotional economy, sense-making, expansion of time and communities of interest - and that these are accelerating and creating greater and greater emotional and social fragmentation.

As the leader, it's imperative to make sense of it all and to bring your people together by finding and connecting common interest and purpose.

Final Thoughts

Want to be a more focused leader? Seek to master your attention and master what's most important through self-awareness.? Here a few ideas that you can implement right now.

• Simply listening more than talking when engaging with your direct reports or others,
• Identify your blind spots through self-reflection or with the help of a colleague, mentor or coach (or significant other),
• Embrace a new daily habit that will help you maintain focus throughout the day, including mindfulness methods like taking 5-10 minutes a day for self-reflection, focused breathing, and walking in nature, among others.

To help you have improved focus and greater clarity so you can be the best leader you can be, I created the Leader's Clarity GPS?, a simple to use one-page GoogleDoc that in 5 minutes can make all the difference. You can get the Leader's Clarity GPS here.

Until next time!

John J. Fenton is the CEO and Founder of John J Fenton Executive Coaching. He mentors CEOs and Managing Partners who love growing their businesses and having more freedom without all the stress.

Spanning over four decades of real life, in-the-trenches business and leadership experience, John is a leading authority with an approach to leadership that is radically different. ?He brings out the very best in leaders and their teams through a fusion of real-life experiences, current thinking on leadership and business, and practicality. He has helped executives and their teams have more clarity, strengthened trust and improved growth. Formerly the managing partner of the Atlanta Office of BDO USA, one of the world’s largest accounting and consulting firms, John has led teams in transformational change. He is an award-winning speaker, a black belt in the martial art of tai chi and author of the bestselling book, "5 Minute Mastery?, The Surprising Secrets for Transforming Your Stress to Success and Mastering What’s Important."

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