The Five Dangers of a Distracted Leader

If you are a leader, you’ll know that you are working in an environment where you are more distracted than any generation in human history. 

Your ability to pay attention and focus is under attack.  You have more demands, more initiatives and more technology coming at you that deflect your attention and dominate your distraction. 

Yet your ability to focus and pay attention to the right things at the right time are the secret ingredients to success and high performance in leadership, in business and in life!                                                     

As a leader or aspiring leader, you’re likely going to be someone that wants to be considered as a high-performer, someone that wants to build high-performing teams so you can influence your own results and your team’s results with more certainty.

Having coached hundreds of leaders at all levels of the leadership hierarchy, I know that a distracted mind is an unproductive mind, and an unproductive leader is a leader that is considered a low performer and ultimately a leader that their peers judge as a failure.

So what can you do to dismantle distraction and fuel focus?

Based on studies I’ve conducted over almost a decade, I used the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule to identify the top 20% causes of distraction and created the Fueling Your Focus Formula that has helped my clients to achieve 20% more free time in their day and increasing productivity by up to 80%. 

SIMPLIFY

Complexity and distraction is the adversary of execution.  Too often, leaders get distracted by the details.  They are reactive and putting out fires instead of stepping back and having complete clarity on the outcomes for the next 12-months.

A Stanford University study in the 1960s analysed data from Fortune 500 companies.  The study found a 35% discrepancy between the companies’ objectives and what was actually delivered.  The problem was not that the employees were incompetent but that the objectives were too ambiguous. 

Are you clear on your 12-month outcomes, professionally and personally?  

What milestones do you need to hit in 9-months, 6-months, 3-months to know that you’re on track?  

As simple as this concept sounds, most leaders don’t prioritise and block out time to clearly define a simple and specific set of outcomes for the next 12-months.   

It’s time to simplify and get clear!   

• Schedule time to get clear on your top three 12-month outcomes.
• Be specific with your definition of these outcomes – make them time-bound and measurable, e.g. Deliver 300 units of Serial No. 1234 by 30^th June with at least 96% conformance.
• Break your 12-month outcomes into quarterly outcomes using the same specificity as above – it’s important to know that you are progressing towards your desired outcome.
• Create a baseline, a line in the sand, from where you want to measure improvements in performance and progress.
• Capture your daily or weekly, monthly achievements against the targets and baseline.
• Make the outcomes visible – create key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Use this process if you’re a business leader, a team leader or if you’re defining your own set of simple personal goals. 

SIGNIFICANCE

Humans are wired to seek out instant gratification.  Distraction is a very simple way to meet our need for instant gratification…but at what cost?  

As tempting as it is, just to feel some sense of achievement, the easy task that you can complete quickly often isn’t the most important…either is checking your social media, for that matter ;) 

Studies have shown that if people know how their tasks or goals contribute to the greater good, that their work is meaningful, and that it’s making a positive difference, they attach more significance to the work they are doing.  This drives sustained high-performance, achievement and success. 

Unfortunately, today many employees don’t even know why they’re doing what they’re doing.  If there is no significant reason to work towards the goal, our little enemy, distraction, will win the game. 

Another perspective to be aware of is that many employees feel overworked because there is a lack of clarity of a simplified and prioritized set of outcomes.  As a consequence, they find themselves diffusing their focus to many low priority tasks because they are not clear on which tasks will get them closer to their outcomes quickly and efficiently.  This results in high levels of stress.  When people are feeling stressed, they will seek distraction from the source of the stress. 

How to make your goals significant enough to focus on: 

• Identify all the primary and secondary benefits of achieving the outcomes in the SIMPLIFY step.
• Capture the primary and secondary costs of not achieving the outcomes in the SIMPLIFY step.
• What would it mean for you, your team, your business if you were to achieve these outcomes?
• What would it mean for you, your team, your business if you did not achieve these outcomes?
• Once you capture the answers to these questions, you have just created a SIGNIFICANT reason why these outcomes are important. 

SCHEDULE

Many leaders I’ve worked with suffer from a case of chronic adrenalin addiction.  They love the feeling of achievement that solving an immediate problem gives them.  Technical leaders, in particular, suffer from this as they have been conditioned to find the answers to problems. 

Urgency is another deceptive enemy to focus and performance.  Former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower supposedly once said: “The most urgent decisions are rarely the most important ones.”  He had a method for managing his time that is now known as the Eisenhower Matrix.

Many leaders often fall foul of prioritizing tasks based on who is shouting the loudest or who has the most authority.  Neither of these approaches focuses attention on the first step – SIMPLIFY that articulates clearly the three most important and highest priority outcomes and where the focus should be invested. 

If you don’t schedule your days, you lose your weeks.  When you lose the weeks, you lose the months and the year. 

The simplest method to schedule your time productively: 

• Plan your outcomes for the week – use the SIMPLIFY method above.
• Capture why it’s important to achieve these outcomes – use the SIGNIFICANCE method above.
• Break your weekly outcomes into discrete daily tasks. Create blocks of time in your diary focused on nothing but the specific task allocated to that block – no meetings, no interruptions, just that task!
• Prioritise the most important tasks for the morning and schedule meetings for the afternoon.
• Be realistic with what you can achieve in one day. 

 STRUCTURE

Too many leaders are prisoners to their calendar, emails and writing reports.  I know leaders who still feel like they need to control every outcome from their team and fall into micro-management.  

They accept every meeting request that is sent to them as they don’t want to miss any detail.  More often than not, they get very little return on their invested time, and they complain about having too many meetings.  

It’s ok to say “NO” to a meeting! 

I worked with a General Manager in Operations who fitted this mould.  I challenged him to not attend any meeting for the next week that he was not the chairperson of.  He had to request that the chairperson of the meetings he didn’t attend that week come by his office and give him a 3 - 5  minute debrief of the key meeting outcomes. 

After the first week, the General Manager removed 8 hours of meetings from his weekly calendar.  That’s an entire workday, 20% of the week, freed up to focus on what’s important!! 

What else can you add to your daily routine to create discipline and structure around where your focus should go? 

• Keep your daily, weekly and monthly outcomes visible.
• Focus only on the task that is scheduled for each block of time.
• Turn off email notifications.
• Schedule a time in the afternoon to review your emails and only check them during that block of time – let your contacts know that is the only time you review emails.
• If any of your team members requires your help or input, instruct them to come to you for a face-to-face conversation. If that’s not possible, request that they call you.  This can resolve issues in a matter of seconds instead of a back-and-forth for days via email.
• Delete Social Media apps from your phone or, at the very least, turn off the notifications.
• Schedule breaks at least every 40 minutes – even if it’s to take two minutes to grab a glass of water.  Get away from your desk, move your body and take a few deep breaths.
• Learn to delegate the right tasks to the right team members so you are leveraging their talents.
• Celebrate the small wins. 

SHARPEN 

Have you ever made the same mistake more than once?  I know I have!  All too often, I see leaders fall into old patterns of behaviour and make the same mistakes over and over.  The consequences can be significant and compounding for their reputation and the performance of the team.  Getting distracted by those things that are not important is one of those mistakes I see over and over. 

Step 3 – SCHEDULE should be repeated every single day.  It’s so critical to take control of your focus and time.  If you don’t, your focus will be at the mercy of other’s demands. 

As part of this daily preparation, a powerful tool to include in this daily ritual is to reflect and review your own personal performance as a leader in the past 24 hours.  Answering the questions below is a great place to start: 

• What went well that I can acknowledge in myself and celebrate?
• What didn’t go as well as I would have liked it to?
• What can I do to refine and adjust my approach next time?
• What did I not do that I need to add to my daily habit?
• What could I add to my daily STRUCTURE or system to optimize my focus and performance?
• What parts of the first four steps in the Fueling Your Focus Formula can I make even better?
• If I was my own leadership coach, what would I tell myself about the last 24 hours? 

This practice is all in service of SHARPENING your focus and behaviour so that you avoid stress and overwhelm and you avoid creating a low-performing team that doesn’t respect you. 

Instead, this practice will develop leadership habits to make you lead even more effectively, create even more meaningful results and create a work-life balance while you do it. 

I know all of this sounds simple.  Don’t be one of those leaders that get caught up in ‘sophistication bias.’  None of what I’ve shared requires great intelligence or sophistication, just uncommon levels of discipline, persistence and common sense.  In an age where we have come to believe that improvement can only be found in complexity, it’s hard for well-educated leaders to embrace something so simple and straightforward.  Don’t be one of them! 

If you got some value from this post, go ahead, scroll down, give it a like, and share with me in the comments below what your biggest distraction is at work. 

Until next time, keep doing the basics consistently well, and you will be a world-class leader. 

Marty