The Focused Few: Why Top Performers Say No (A Lot)
How great leaders protect their team's time, eliminate distractions, and keep everyone in flow.
Welcome to Coaching Contemplations, a newsletter full of ideas and insights that will help you equip yourself with game-changing strategies in leadership and coaching to succeed at work and achieve your goals.
Before we dive in, here are a few ideas to share with your curious, ambitious friends and colleagues:
+ Before You Step Into The Office, if you're entering the professional world, this book is a roadmap of practical tips to help you avoid forming bad habits and feeling lost when challenges ariseātilting the odds in your favour for career success.
+ RYse Journal, a self-coaching journal for mastering the behaviours to motivate yourself and succeed at work.
š„ - Focus
The most successful people I coach are experts at saying no to keep their top priorities front and centre. This contrasts sharply with a common trap many people fall into: they have, over time, become unfocused, which often leads to a sense of being stuck. These are some common symptoms of being unfocused:
A packed calendar with no room to breathe.
Neglecting essential parts of your life, such as family, relationships and health.
Underinvestment in self-development.
Being unfocused is one of the common chronic issues I see with teams. The leader and team members struggle to explain their goals and priorities concisely and clearly without resorting to a lengthy list of to-dos.
As you progress through the managerial ranks, everything flows from how you spend your time. You set a meeting, and everyone rearranges their schedule. Time is the emphasis, and your calendar directly affects what gets done in the team and how you spend the time of the people who work for you.
Yet the tragedy of the modern workplace is that much of what you will do or say today is not essential. Your team's busyness doesn't automatically equate to real work in service of your team's goals. Therefore, your role is to remove distractions so that your team can be in a flow state, or as close to a flow state as possible, for as long as possible every single day. Being in a state of flow, often referred to as being "in the zone," is a mental state characterised by complete absorption and engagement in an activity. It involves intense focus, a sense of control, and intrinsic enjoyment, often accompanied by a distorted sense of time. [ref] When you first take over a team, you will inevitably inherit a group of people whose members are doing things without questioning why. The list of activities might include producing a periodic report without checking with recipients to ensure they derive additional value from consuming it, receiving system-generated emails and reports without understanding how to utilise the information, or attending a meeting without understanding one's role. These numerous existing low-value or wholly unnecessary tasks are a significant part of the organisational debt that has accumulated in your team (the remainder of the organisational debt stems from inappropriate reporting lines and poorly conceived processes and team norms). Each task, whether existing or new and the distractions that will try to attach to your team are friction, slowing down everything they do and hampering their ability to achieve the desired results.
Elon Musk challenges conventional wisdom by employing the heuristic, "unless the laws of physics say you need to do something, you don't," which is rooted in first-principles thinking. His approach involves breaking problems down into their most fundamental truths and reasoning upward from there rather than relying on analogies or assumptions. You can establish a similar hurdle for your team to help them be more judicious with how they spend their time by asking, "Which of the team's goals is the task in service of achieving?" If you cannot collectively identify the goal for which the task is necessary, add it to the stop-doing list. The stop-doing list is where you make time to stop doing things, as it won't always be possible to stop doing a legacy task immediately. Some tasks will require handing over to others who are not on your team, such as informing a meeting host that a team member will no longer be attending.
Another way to help your team focus on what matters most is the Urgent and Important matrix, often referred to as the Eisenhower Principle. In 1954, former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." This principle is said to be how he organised his workload and priorities, and is an effective way to help team members be more focused on what really matters:
Important activities have an outcome that leads to you achieving the team's goals.
Urgent activities require immediate attention and are typically associated with achieving someone else's objectives.
When a team member says they are always too busy or someone fails to meet the high expectations you set for everyone (both of which are inevitable parts of people management), you can help them help themselves. When a team member knows which activities are important and which are urgent, you can help them overcome the ingrained habit of focusing on unimportant tasks, which frees up enough time to do what's essential for the team's success.
Flattering distractions may be the most insidious way to slow down your team and reduce its effectiveness. As your success at work grows and you gain seniority, an increasing number of people will want some of your time, whether to "pick your brain", ask you to be a mentor or similar. You may also get nominated to participate in this division or that firm-wide initiative. You must be strong and maintain robust boundaries to ensure flattering distractions are an insignificant part of your team's workday. In extreme cases, a moratorium should be imposed on them during a crisis or when approaching a significant deadline. I have seen experienced executives and teams fall into the trap of building up a portfolio of these flattering distractions, which consume an increasing amount of their time and attention. They inevitably feel hard done by and slighted when they don't receive the bonus or promotion they think they are owed because their team's performance didn't meet expectations. They had allowed themselves to focus on the wrong things.
Use the heuristic "Eliminate any task that is not strictly necessary and in service of achieving the team's goals" to conduct regular reviews of your team's work, helping them reduce distractions and stay focused on the most pressing tasks that support the team's objectives.
š§¾ - An absorbing and insightful (short) read
Can a boss ever switch off?
Link to the article - here.
š¤ - If you did have the answer to this question, what would it be?
Where does your role demand a balancing act that no longer feels manageable?