The Power of Focus

Dave Abraham writes ....

By focusing on a small number of things, and do them really, really well, you can achieve more, and really harness the power of a team.

There are many books and theories on focus. There are 3 books/people that have really influenced my thinking. I will briefly give my take and experience.

1) I recently read, and love the book The One thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, which espouses how you should work out what your one most important thing is, and focus on doing that really well. It also says how you can achieve a great deal by doing so, because sequentially you can do one thing, and then another, and then another. And if they're all towards one bigger thing, then you can achieve a massive amount.

2) I have seen Jeff Grout present several times, and he has a great model for leadership, which has 3 tiers:

Outcome goal - a descriptive, compelling and inspiring outcome that you're aiming for, such as " win 50m swimming olympic gold medal", which is much like your " one thing" that you or a team can buy into
Performance goal - a specific, measurable goal that you must achieve to be able to achieve your outcome goal. The hard facts of what you have to do, which may be more daunting than inspiring!
Process goals - the steps that you need to go through to get to the performance goal, e.g. in the case of winning a swimming goal medal, the process goals may be around pre race preparation, the dive, the swim stroke, the turn, and the finish

3) A few years ago, I was given some great advice at Cranfield school of management when doing the Business Growth Programme, which went something along the lines of "even the cleverest MD/CEO can't focus on more than 3 or 4 things at once, so structure your focus into 3 or 4 things. Make sure that each person that reports to you has a maximum of 4 things to focus on, that are aligned with 1 or more of your 4 things that you are focused on.". Which means that if you have 5 direct reports each doing 4 clear things towards your 4 goals, and they each have 5 direct reports - this means that you have 5 people x 4 things, managing 5 people doing 4 things towards their manager's 4 things (which are in line with your 4 things). That's 25 people, doing 4 significant things each = 100 things being done, all towards the 4 most important things to you. And whether you've only got 15 people, or have 50 people, the scaling works similarly - you can get an immense amount done, all toward the 4 most important themes for your business. And you can just keep focused on your 4 key themes, and what your direct reports are doing towards them. Cranfield as well as the fantastic book Good to Great by Jim Collins also talk about "Vision" which is a long term set of principles that are why your business exists, and should be constant and unchanging, and a "Mission" which is a clear, specific, measurable (SMART) objective in a clear time frame, which will take you towards your Vision. But once you've achieved your current mission, you will then set a new mission.

These 3 bits of advice/concepts have been incredibly helpful to successfully writing and executing a business plan. In fact, it guides to writing a 1 page business plan, which is the easiest way to execute and get a whole team to align around the key focus areas needed to deliver on a Vision and Mission.

If you're writing a business plan for an SME with a few million pounds turnover, I hope you might find this advice useful. The advice was give to me from people that ran larger businesses, so I'm sure it applies to larger businesses, but I only successfully tested it up to a few million turnover, so I won't vouch for it's applicability to larger businesses! I would encourage you to think about the following:

Write a Vision statement, or Outcome goal. This should be descriptive and compelling, and I believe should avoid being too specific - it shouldn't have a metric. You never really get there, but it your guiding principles. This is not easy, so I won't cover it in detail here, and there are many books on the subject! No more than 2 or 3 sentences that will inspire your team and customers, as well as you.
Write a Mission statement, or Performance goal, for the period of the plan - e.g. 1 year, or possibly 3 years, or 6 months. This should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic, Time-Based), and should be clear and compelling to your team, not just to you.
define at least 1 "maintain" objective, a theme starting with the word "Maintain ...." and then define the things that are already good about the business that you want to maintain at least as well as at the moment, e.g. existing customer relationships, key supplier relationships. If there are 1 or 2 clear specific metrics that will measure that you have achieved it, include them. Don't skip this one (unless you're a start-up with nothing to maintain) - it's really important to keep your mind, and that of your team conscious that there are already some great things about your company that you want to maintain, and that they shouldn't be overlooked by any change initiatives.
define up to 3 change objectives - themes of change that you want to achieve. And this is the important bit - if there are more than 3, either:
- work through the list and work out if there is a common theme running through several of them, that you can summarise them as 1 theme, and each of them then becomes a sub-objective
- or, shorten the time frame of the plan (whilst keeping it realistic), and choose which 3 are the most important themes to implement first. Once you've completed this plan, these things will then move into the "maintain" section, of the next plan
Keep refining until there are a maximum of 4 objectives - at least 1 maintain objective, and a maximum of 3 change objectives.

And then under the maintain objective(s) create a maximum of 4 bullet points with a measurable objective on each one which will contribute to achieving the objective.

Under each of the change objectives, create a maximum of 4 bullet points with a measurable objective on each one which will contribute to achieving the objective. And make sure that the Mission and 4 areas of objectives, with 4 sub-objectives each fit onto 1 page

Now the power comes to make sure that each of your direct reports is working towards at least 1 of, and no more than 4 of your objectives. Make sure that every one of your objectives has at least one person in your team working towards it.

In this way, you can make sure that all your objectives have some focus on them, they all have some people in your team working towards them, and also everyone in your team knows that they are contributing towards key things on your plan.

In executing it, make sure that everyone in your team is focused on your 4 things. If they want to talk about things that aren't in your 4 key areas of focus, discuss whether it's really important (or if it is contributing towards the big 4). If it does, great, it's important. If not, quickly evaluate whether it is more important (in which case you need to re-evaluate the plan, you missed something big), or carefully point out that, it's not as important as the other things, and ask them to focus on the more important areas of focus.

Also beware the tendancy of some leaders: if one of the bullet points only has you allocated to work on it, and no-one else, beware that this probably means that you are not aligned with your team! If you only have 4 top level bullet points, and one of them is just you and there's a good reason for that, it may be fine. But if you've got 4 themes for the team, and have added a 5th one that only you are going to work on, because you couldn't justify having your team focus on it, then you're trying to cheat at pretend that you've only got 4 themes when really there are 5! (Yes, we've all done this!) In which case the chances are that either you won't do the 5th one very well, or you'll do your one well, but won't give all the other 4 themes that your team are working on the focus. So your team will think that their 4 aren't actually the most important to you, and so they will also lose focus on your 4 things, by adding a 5th and 6th one of their own. At which point, your team has lost focus on your 4 things, because each person is doing at least 1 or 2 things not aligned with either you - or each other!

So keep get your 3 or 4 objectives - at least one maintain objective, and up to 3 change objectives, and the 3-4 actions for each objective. Print it out and put it on your wall, and look at it every day. And make sure that you can say out loud the 4 top level objectives without referring to your list.

And then lead your team - be interested in everything that your team does towards those goals, and encourage them and give positive feedback on anything that they do towards those goals. Remember that they probably won't remember the 4 objectives as well as you do, so keep reiterating the key objectives, and when you give positive feedback, be clear which objective that is helping to deliver upon.

The Power of Focus to execute a business plan