Focus and Velocity

What if the answer to your organisation’s challenges is to focus and go faster?

Attend any leadership program and they will talk about the importance of leaders work in vision, alignment and accountability. Large organisations expend huge amounts of management time and effort on inspiring and communicating shared vision, managing alignment and creating accountability. Often all this work results in a multitude of projects and overlapping systems pulling against each other for energy and attention of teams.

Visions without execution are often sprawling delusions that demotivate employees and generate confusion rather than effort. Alignment for its own sake can turn into mindless politics and in large complex organisations it can be very unclear which of the many number one priorities, mandatories and diverging divisional goals people are aligning around. Accountability can become a culture of fear with continuous performance monitoring rather than a focus on learning and improvement for progress.

Working in startup cultures, I have had the experience of seeing the power of leadership that concentrates on two other challenges:

• Focus: Are the resources of the organisation focused well enough on the few actions that will deliver success?
• Velocity: Are we making progress fast enough?

Creating an organisational conversation and practice around enhancing focus and velocity delivers step changes in performance. Critically that leadership practice will resolve many of the issues that management theory sought to resolve with vision, alignment and accountability.

Focus to the work of the team is a far more tangible and near term way to engage people in what is important. Focus gives something on which people can pull into alignment, rather than alignment being a constant task of leaders to push. Lastly focus, doing more of fewer things, reduces the conflicts and confusion across the organisation. Success is clearer and it is easier to take the organisation towards it when it is pursuing focused activities and goals.

Velocity recognises that performance in organisations is often systemic. Leaders who enable the teams to move faster will be clearing blockages and impediments and enabling the next level of achievement. Teams focused on velocity will have a mindset of continuous improvement towards their goals. Velocity also pulls people into alignment as focused teams get on with their work and other race to catch up and support that work. The tangible delivery that comes from velocity is much more engaging than any fancy vision or performance rating.

Vision, alignment snd accountability describe outcomes. As a result there is a temptation for leaders to see these as things to be set up and the outcome follows. Focus and velocity aren’t outcomes. They are ways of doing the work.

Critically for leaders, the work of focus and velocity is never done. You can’t just announce and walk away. Complexity creeps into work in many ways and there will need to be constant pruning to maintain focus. Better velocity takes continuing effort from everyone. New barriers are always being discovered just as the new ways to get work done.

Here are two questions to ask often:

• are we spending enough of our time and efforts on the few things that really matter for success?
• what can we do to deliver more faster?

Rather than discussing a distant future, fighting over resources or performance ratings concentrate your efforts into a few goals and help people to get there faster. Concentrate your team’s energy and enthusiasm on the speed of real progress. The outcomes of focus and velocity will surprise you.