Many engineering organizations find it challenging to keep delivering value faster as they grow and mature. Some people take that for granted. I object. There are common pitfalls that we can learn to notice. One is the utter lack of focus, especially across the organization. When the team doesn’t know what it’s trying to achieve, no wind is a good wind. Here are the steps to reclaim your team’s potential and introduce focus.
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Where Are You Headed?
A fundamental part of focus is knowing what you should be focusing on. For your team to know that, you have to first. Do you genuinely understand the company’s strategy and goals? Can you explain why the current milestones or objectives were chosen and how those connect to the company’s vision?
Not being able to do that means that you’ll be severely lacking in understanding where you are headed. That, in turn, will make it incredibly difficult to instill purpose in your people. It’s like when your dad insists he knows how to get somewhere and doesn’t need to fire up “that stupid Waze,” but you can see him getting more anxious as he’s trying to read street signs. How can you lead if you’re not headed anywhere in particular?
Assess Their Understanding
This is a real exercise I often do when I start advising a new client: I ask to connect to a few people randomly in the organization. As part of a short interview, I ask them what is their team’s current main objective and why it matters. In focused organizations, the answers are coherent and make sense. However, in most companies, I get different responses within the same team or blank stares.
What would happen if you did the same exercise with your team? If you’re sure the responses would be a cacophony of assumptions even before attempting it, you know what you have to do. Define your objectives and strategy in a way that will be accessible to your average team member. Have discussions about it. Make sure that your management team all have an in-depth understanding of it and know when to escalate or ask follow-up questions.
Embody the Goals
Have you ever sat through a big all-hands where the CEO announced specific priorities and the logic behind them, yet the following day, virtually nothing was different? You went back to your project that had objectives that no longer connected to the discussed strategy. What are you then supposed to do? Pretend that what you’re doing matters?
I’m sure that you have a bunch of ostensibly good reasons to do so, but chances are your organization suffers from the same. Every few months, I sit down with a cofounder who explains with great detail the company’s OKRs and then draws the org chart. When I mention that the organization is not aligned with the objectives, they usually realize it only then. Make your organization embody the goals, so people’s answers from the previous section become straightforward.
Give Goals Gravity
Similarly, real focus means that we’re using the declared goals to decide what we’re not going to do. If your solution to focus and getting everything else done is to talk about the important goals and ensure they’re clear, yet task the team with achieving a whole bunch of unrelated objectives (that risk your declared priorities)—then you’re doing it wrong.
When people see ideas being neglected or postponed with reasoning attributed to your strategy and objectives, they see that you’re putting your money where your mouth is. There’s very little that helps create focus and spread it in an organization more than having the same focus utilized by leaders in the open. Use your focus as a reason to say “no” to things.
Goals Can Be Done
Another way of ensuring that your focus gets the proper attention is having goals that are results-centered and thus can actually be done. Otherwise, we end up with vague goals that feel undone even after a meticulously executed quarter. The team can never tell whether the right things were done or not.
Good goals mean that it is possible, even if it is a stretch, for the team to achieve its goals ahead of time. When that happens, the team has done so well that it has earned time. How you use that time is up to you. In a recent workshop, I advised giving the team at least a portion of that time to use, giving them ‘skin in the game’ for delivering results fast.
Measure It
Lastly, it is remarkable how much easier it is to retain focus when we track our progress toward goals and do so routinely. This might seem like a trivial addition. It is. However, common sense is rare. Knowing that’s the right thing to do doesn’t mean it’s easy to have the discipline to stick with it.
Sometimes, all a leader needs to do is choose a healthy metric and keep the team accountable to it. Start focusing.