Chapter 59.
Focus Like a Camera

Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.

—Bernard Baruch

We want to introduce a kind of leadership that we find in only one out of every 10 leaders we work with.

We call it focused leadership. It’s the ability on the part of a leader to be absolutely focused. And what we mean by focused is not hard-core, intense concentration, as if you’re forcing something. It’s really the opposite. It’s a much more relaxed sense of focus.

So what we’d like you to do is picture a camera focusing: you’re looking through the camera and it looks fuzzy, and as you turn the focus dial or knob, you don’t have to jam it or whack it or slam it. All you have to do is move it very gently one way or the other, and, all of a sudden, the whole picture comes into focus. That same thing can happen with your outlook as a leader.

Someone will walk into your office and sit down. Notice that you are beginning to focus on him like a camera, because there’s that internal dial in you that is very slowly moving until the person across the way comes into a gentle, relaxed, absolute focus.

And now, you may breathe a sigh (go ahead), and take a deep breath, and say, “Tell me what’s on your mind. How’re you doing? Let’s talk about this issue here.”

Your employee will pick up on this gentle, relaxed sense of focus, and be honored by it. They will be thinking this about you: It’s as if we’re the only two people in the world right now. It feels like we’re on a desert island and we’ve got all the time in the world.

You will be thinking, And I’m listening to you, and you and I are going to get to the bottom of this. But not in a rushed way, and not because we have to. But because that’s where the conversation will take us in an open way. In a way that honors you and acknowledges you, and hears you, and we just talk. We’re going to exchange some ideas, I’m going to ask you some questions, and we’re going to find out what the two of us think about this. I’m not going to tell you what to do. And I’m not someone who’s got an agenda that’s hidden that I’m going to reveal to you bit by bit as I talk to you. I’m wide open. I’m like a camera.

And you are a great leader.

You already know the other kind of leader, the not so great one; the leader who comes into meetings carrying his electronic organizer, and while he’s sitting in the meeting, he’ll be returning e-mails, picking up his vibrating cell phone every two or three minutes to see who it is, and also trying to be in the meeting.

He’s thinking he’s multitasking, but really, he’s just not focused. And everyone who runs into that leader feels diminished by the exchange.

We talked to Richie about a leader of his who behaves that way.

“I always feel about him that he’s someone who has no time for me,” Richie said. “That’s someone who’d really rather not be talking to me right now. The minute I sit down he rattles off a list of ideas he has. He doesn’t care what I think.”

That “leader” doesn’t know that of the hundred people he communicated with that week in some form—some by e-mail, some by PDA, some by fax, some by phone, some in person, some in the hallway—all 100 people have been distanced by this behavior.

And maybe, deep down, this dysfunctional manager senses the distancing that’s happening. And so he has an uneasy feeling. He must fix this sense of things not going right. But rather than slowing down, he speeds up even more!

Once we told a manager who behaved this way that he ought to wear a sign around his neck.

“What do you mean a sign around my neck?”

“You ought to wear a sign, like people do in treatment centers when they’re trying to solve a personal issue, and the sign should say, ‘I HAVE NO TIME FOR YOU.’”

He said nothing.

“You also might want to have your e-mail send an automatic reply to people saying, ‘I HAVE NO TIME FOR YOU.’”

“Why would I do that? I could never do that,” he said.

“You’re doing it now. You’re sending that message now. This way, you’d just be more up front about it.”

When we coach managers to open up and focus on their people, like a camera, it actually saves them time in the long run. Because it takes a lot less time to manage a motivated, trusting team than it does to work with a demoralized, upset team.