Sharpening Your Focus
Sharpening your focus seems obvious enough, but when your company has multiple opportunities and a host of growth-related challenges it can be hard to do. Plus, how you go about sharpening your focus changes at each stage of a company’s growth.
As an early-stage founder or leader of a small team, you can sharpen your own individual focus and impact the direction of a nimble team. But as the team grows, the nimble skiff becomes an ocean liner whose direction is much harder to shift.
There are 3 parts to an organization’s focus:
Vision
Strategy
Goal Setting
Vision
Vision is the long term goal or purpose of the company - the north star. How does the company complete the sentence, “We exist to…?” This is the emotional why that connects employees’ work to the company. The seminal work on vision was written by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in an HBR article titled “Build Your Company’s Vision.” A vision will never change or be realized, but it is that point on the far off horizon towards which we set our course.
Strategy
Strategy is a set of medium term goals or initiatives that the company plans to accomplish over a period of time, usually 3-5 years, in pursuit of the vision. If the vision is the why, then strategy is the what. What are we going to accomplish? What are our most important priorities. Strategy is set at the corporate level by the leadership team with input from employees, board members, and other key stakeholders.
Goals
Goals are the near-term tasks the company must accomplish in support of the strategy. If vision is the why and strategy is the what, then goals are the how. Goals may exist on many levels - corporate, team and individual goals. Goals may be set monthly, quarterly or annually. Cascading goals refer to a structure where each individual employee sets his/her own personal goals aligned with a set of departmental or team goals which are further aligned with a set of overall corporate goals.
Strategy and the goals that support strategy are structures that create alignment and accountability.
Alignment occurs when everyone in the company is mobilized around a common set of goals that advance the company’s business strategy. When we think about alignment, we think about the power of singular focus on a team’s ability to achieve results.
When organizations are out of alignment, politics, competing priorities, undermining confusion, duplicate of effort, frequent pivots - just to name a few - exist. Each of these causes friction which hampers efforts to deliver on strategy.
We frequently interview leadership team members of high growth companies to get a deeper understanding of how their organization is functioning. One of the things we like to do is test for alignment. We ask each person what the strategy of the business is and to tell us the top priorities for the company. In a well aligned company, leaders will be singing from the same hymn book, easily able to recite the same strategy and key priorities. In a company that lacks sharp focus, we will hear different music entirely.
Goal setting gives you a framework against which to measure performance and productivity so that you can hold people and teams accountable for advancing the strategy of the business.
If your company’s focus is sharp, every employee will understand the vision and strategy of the business. They will have goals and priorities that align with the vision and strategy. They will understand how their work connects to the business strategy and see the importance of their work in the success of the business. They will prioritize their tasks based on the overall priorities of the business. You’ll have smooth sailing whether you’re on the skiff or the ocean liner.
We can walk you through how to sharpen your company’s focus to drive growth. Find out more by visiting our website at www.PeopleCap.com.
