Focus
Many of my coachees* are grappling with focus, prioritisation and ‘staying out of the weeds’ right now. This seems to be the case with coachees of all seniorities including the most senior.
As is my habit, I have been reflecting on focus and prioritisation as they are coming up so frequently in my practice.
As background, I am not sure I have come across many organisations which could not achieve more by trying to do less. The interference of some corporate plans is immense; exhaustion, overload, inability to ‘get out of those weeds’ being the consequences.
If I’m coaching a CEO the challenge is for her/him to achieve focus on strategic priorities at an organisational level. With other coachees, and it really is many at the moment, the starting point may well be personal choices and behaviours which lead to sufficient focus on strategic longer-term priorities.
It’s hardly an original thought, but it’s worth repeating, that too many people fail to devote sufficient thought and time to the ‘important/not urgent’ section of the Eisenhower matrix. Urgency is the time devourer; what’s worse it’s often not your own “urgent” actions which swallow your time but last minute stuff created by the failure by others adeptly to plan ahead. Don’t do this to others.
(By the way, one solution to the ‘important/not urgent’ issue is always to have your top long-term priorities at the top of your To Do list and to ensure they are broken down into manageable chunks, each with a deadline.)
My reflections have led me to having a ‘getting out of the weeds’ workshop (one-to-one) which I offer to my coachees. It has various parts including a model to try out but I won’t bore you with all of it. To kickstart your thinking here are just two themes:
The designs and resourcing of many organisations these days are deliberately lean; some achieve high shareholder return via under-resourcing and over-reliance on long hours. In these lean structures people’s development path to senior roles can be foreshortened and therefore the speed at which you are required to evolve has accelerated. The evolution is from ‘busyness’ to effectiveness, from operationally occupied to strategically focused. This lends itself well to coaching. It, the speed, is interference in itself.
I’m on record about taking a scythe to your meetings. They swallow time. As an HRD I used to keep a rough running tally of the cost of meetings I attended based on the salaries of those in the room. Sometimes I called it out if the meeting was achieving nothing. Cut their duration; reduce their frequency; reduce the number of attendees; ideally abolish some of them. Ensure your default challenge to yourself is “am I actually needed there?”
Many more ideas where they came from. Get in touch if you’d like to work on this.
You’d be in very good company.
*I prefer the term ‘players’ but it’s not universally recognised, even within the coaching community.