This chapter will help you cut through the noise and bustle of your daily grind and identify those things that really matter. The most effective employees are those who know how to focus their action and attention on those things that directly contribute to desired outcomes. As a leader, you need to develop the ability to focus and you need to inculcate that same ability in all of your staff.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Nowadays people live in a world where they can have pretty much instant access to anything they want 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our society seems to crave instant gratification; people want success and they want it now. Against this background and an ever-increasing pace of life, it is easy to believe that when you respond very quickly, you are behaving with urgency and that to strive for an even quicker speed of reaction is the right thing to do. The reality is that urgency and speed of reaction are not the same thing. Urgency is not about speed; it is about focus and energy – focusing relentlessly on what is important for survival, for growth and for change and to do it now, not sometime in the future when you have time in your busy schedule.
Most managers believe that they have created urgency when they see lots of people running around doing lots of things. Paradoxically, in order to have the time to behave with urgency, it is often necessary to do less – that is, to create the space needed to think about the future, to be able to take action when action is needed, to make commitments and follow them through. At a time when you seem to be constantly running faster just to stay in the same place, when your diaries are crowded with back-to-back meetings from 8.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m., clearing the space to be able to devote time to take focused, important and energetic action may appear to be an impossible task, but it is essential and you must find a way to achieve it.
THE IMPACT OF THE ISSUE
Leaders are not paid to do the routine tasks that keep the wheels turning; that is the role of team leaders and supervisors. Most day-to-day operations can take care of themselves without much attention, or oversight, from the leader. What the leader is paid to do is to find new and novel ways to make the wheels go around more effectively.
Better still, they are there to envisage and create an organisation that doesn’t run on wheels, but rather has some sort of frictionless super-drive that costs less to run and produces more output with greater quality and customer satisfaction.
In short, leaders are paid to achieve the extraordinary, rather than the ordinary.
Figure 5.1 Using an analogy to reframe a problem
You cannot achieve extraordinary things when you are bogged down with other people’s trivia and noise, which they should be dealing with themselves. Many leaders either feel that they are powerless to achieve anything other than maintain the status quo, or they feel afraid to try anything different in case it fails; sometimes they may really have the desire, but they just cannot find the time, or the energy, because they are so busy doing the less important stuff. It is also important to remember that as a leader you are also a role model for your team; if they see you running around like a headless chicken they are likely to adopt the same behaviour. You need to focus on the important tasks and you need your team to understand what is important and focus their attentions accordingly.
MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL
A sense of urgency is not to be confused with frantic activity focused on meeting upon meeting, fire-fighting, back protecting or the pursuit of the trivial or the unimportant. Urgency is about focusing on a few key things and then making the time and finding the energy to see those key things through to completion. In their article ‘Beware the busy manager’, Bruch and Ghoshal report on their findings from 10 years spent studying senior managers in organisations around the world. They suggest that, in their experience, as many as 90 per cent of all managers squander their time on all sorts of ineffective activity. They call it ‘active non-action’, a great expression that neatly describes the sort of frantic posturing that we see from many managers. The big question is what do you have to do to be a part of the 10 per cent of managers who are apparently focused enough to make a difference?
Bruch and Ghoshal identify four types of behaviour associated with how a manager approaches their job: the disengaged, the procrastinator, the distracted and the purposeful. We will look specifically at the purposeful manager, as that is the model to which you should aspire.
Perhaps the thing that most distinguishes the purposeful manager is the way they define themselves with respect to their work and their autonomy for action. Many IT leaders appear to be content to sit in a box defined by others – by their peers, their job description, the business environment and what other people think will work or is appropriate. They operate only within the confines of how their box has been defined.
Purposeful managers are not constrained by the hand that life deals them – they don’t play the cards, even when they know they hold a losing hand. What they do is trade in the cards to get a better hand. They use their network to access required resources, they cultivate relationships with influential people, and they build and acquire competencies with the sole aim of increasing their freedom to act. The most important word in this paragraph is ‘purposeful’: we are not suggesting that you become embroiled in political posturing – we are suggesting that you make yourself and your team aware of the key outcomes that you need to achieve and that you and your team become single minded in doing whatever is necessary to ensure that the desired outcomes are achieved.
So, acting with urgency and purpose is about proactively managing your environment to increase your choice and freedom to act, and then acting with focus on one or two key initiatives to the exclusion of all else, and maintaining energy throughout until your goal is achieved.
We have suggested that the purposeful manager is one who understands the value of focus and applied energy, and also appreciates that these are the two qualities that technology and the modern organisational structure appear to be set up to steal from you. As such, the first rule of acting with urgency and purpose is to actively manage your time – if you allow yourself to be swept along at the pace of others you will lose focus and deplete your reserves of energy.
Here are some basic rules for you to adopt, and we strongly recommend that once you feel the benefit that this brings, you should encourage your team to adopt the same values and practices:
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Set aside specific times of day to deal with email, phone calls and visitors. The most purposeful managers are rigorous about protecting their time:
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Turn off all alerts on your phone and PC – you are not its servant; it is yours. If you start to respond to everything as it hits you, there is no way that you can prioritise.
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Assess the importance of a task in relation to your ‘purpose’. Your prime measure should be ‘does this task contribute to the one or two primary initiatives that I have set myself, or accepted from the leadership team?’
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Increasingly, leaders don’t have personal assistants to protect them and they have open electronic diaries that everyone can see. This may be very egalitarian and the modern equivalent of saying ‘my door is always open’, but it is certainly a sure-fire way of letting other people fill your day with stuff that is important to them, but may be irrelevant to you. Get into the habit of blocking out at least 40 per cent of your time each week – use software functionality to show the time as busy and private. Make a rule that the only people who can steal this time from you are people well above your own pay grade.
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Build in time to reflect on what is happening and what your priorities are. For instance, if you have a one-hour commute to work by car, it may be an idea to designate the morning commute as your reflection time and have your mobile phone turned off. The evening commute, by contrast, may become known to your staff as the time to run things past you or to give you catch-up status reports. Encourage them to talk to you rather than email you. If you need an audit trail, you can always ask them for a short confirmation email. As well as creating time to focus, you also need to find ways of reducing stress and topping up your energy levels. This is an individual and personal need that is likely to be fulfilled outside the work environment by:
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engaging in an absorbing hobby;
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doing sport, exercise or meditation;
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giving something back to your local community – strangely, sometimes the more energy you expend, the more you seem to have.
Once you have got hold of your time and you have found the wellsprings of energy you need for the journey, you must focus all your attention on the journey itself. This requires you to address a meaningful challenge, something that is bigger than your immediate department. It should be of importance to the continued growth and sustainability of your organisation; you should have choice in the way you approach the challenge and you need to enlist the support of your network to gain broad organisational acceptance that finding a solution to this challenge or opportunity will produce lasting value for the organisation.
Once you have found such a challenge, it is easy to see what needs to be focused upon and how you will recognise when you have been successful. It has to be something that you are prepared to make a very visible personal commitment to and also something that you are prepared to bet your reputation on. If your challenge is meaningful and relevant you will find that, as you talk about it with colleagues and staff, people will spontaneously volunteer to come on the journey with you – a real acid test of the organisational value of an initiative is its ability to spontaneously engage and inspire others.
Without such a challenge, urgency can only be maintained for very short periods. It is the difference between the 200-metre sprint and the marathon. Behaving with a sense of urgency is about the long game and finding the reserves of energy and commitment that can carry you through the 26 miles of the marathon to the finishing line.
THINGS FOR YOU TO WORK ON NOW
You have seen that urgency is about focus and focus can only be sustained if it is directly connected to some deeper sense of purpose. You need to find and tap into your deep sense of purpose, you need to know how that purpose brings into focus the key initiatives that your team is tasked to deliver against and then you need to help the members of your team find their own share in that purpose. You cannot give others a sense of purpose but you can help them find a way to share in and contribute towards a common purpose. Often in the daily grind of getting things done and reacting to other people’s crises it is easy to lose connection with your sense of purpose. Think quietly and deeply about the questions listed below, try to find in yourself something that is meaningful and is consistent with your value structure. If all else fails at least try to find your share of a wider purpose.
Once you have discovered a sense of purpose you need to set about creating the space and the focus to give that purpose the attention it deserves. The techniques listed below will help you see where and how you can create some space.
FURTHER FOOD FOR THE CURIOUS
Bruch H. and Ghoshal S. (2002) Beware the Busy Manager. Harvard Business Review, February. Available from https://hbr.org/2002/02/beware-the-busy-manager [21 March 2017]:
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This is an insightful article that opens the box on what managers really do and how they fritter away their time. The stunning conclusion is that fully 90 per cent of managers squander their time on ineffective activities. The good news is that the paper identifies the characteristics of different management behaviours and provides useful pointers on how to become more purposeful.
Kotter J.P. (2008) A Sense of Urgency. Boston: Harvard Business Press:
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This short and engaging book provides an explanation of the tactics that have been found to be effective in creating urgency during change initiatives.