Leaders: Keep Your Focus
I work with coaching clients who get led astray by the BSO (Big Shiny Object). Leaders: Keep your focus — it’s one of the many mantras I share with coaching clients. If you, as a leader, are being led astray and if your projects are not coming to fruition how can you motivate your staff to higher levels of productivity if you aren’t staying enough to task that you’re completing projects? It’s difficult.
In business today, it’s easy to get distracted by the “latest and greatest.” There is nothing wrong with trying something new, incorporating a new procedure or practice, but if you’re doing this continually and not testing the results, your efforts will be scattered and your success minimized.
Leaders: Keep Your Focus
Here are three ways to keep your focus and target the prize: Business Success!
- Know where you’re going. If you don’t have a clear path toward your goal you will be distracted by the BSOs. As a leader you need to articulate to your team — and put in writing in a business plan — what you consider success and the steps you will take to achieve it. Let your team know WHY you want to achieve a specific goal and HOW you see the company getting there. Ask for their buy in and feedback.
- Be clear on priorities and metrics for success. As entrepreneurs it’s easy to want to “do it all” but in truth not everything can be a priority. Not everything is a fire that you need to be personally involved in putting out. Know your top three priorities — with their deadlines — and work toward them.
- At the end of the work day, work week, month and year how will you measure your success? What goals will you need to meet to be a success? How will you focus on what’s important? Just as you can be distracted by incoming emails or Facebook notifications so too can you be distracted by non-priority items and items that are not clearly tied to your success metrics.
As the business leader, your team looks to you for focus and guidance. Provide that, stay on track and watch out for the BSOs. What are the BSOs in your industry? How do you avoid them? If you embrace them, how have they aided in your business success?