Dear leader… A foggy swamp

Dear leader, how much focus do people experience in your organisation? It turns out to be essential for employee motivation and engagement.

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). It seems like half of my children’s classmates have it. The best description of the symptoms: a storm in your head. And consequently great difficulty in keeping your attention on anything. I also came across the term in a completely different context: strategic ADD. In other words: the inability of organisations to focus on the same goals and priorities over long periods of time. A wonderful analogy, used by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile in her contribution to McKinsey Quarterly: How leaders kill meaning at work. Her research shows that making concrete progress in work that matters is the main motivator for employees. In many organisations, employees appear to experience the opposite. Their working lives seem to take place in a foggy swamp: they wade around by feel and have no idea whether their wanderings lead anywhere.

Focus

Lack of focus appears to be a major cause of that ‘swamp feeling’. Work is most enjoyable when you have clear goals that you realise step by step together with others. In an ideal situation, employees have a good idea of their own role and the added value in the bigger picture. They work pleasantly together because their colleagues pursue the same goals. And by consistently sticking to those goals over a longer period of time, they make progress and see concrete results coming from their efforts. Organisations that manage to create focus in this way also turn out to perform best.

Amabile argues that creating focus is primarily a task for senior management. I personally find that executives underestimate that role and often do not realise that their organisation suffers from strategic ADD. From a top position, you quickly feel that the goals and priorities are clear. But as you get lower down in the organisation, employees quickly lose sight of the bigger picture. The number of goals and priorities increases exponentially and coherence gets lost. This is a shame because as a board, there is a lot you can do to ensure focus in your organisation. That is why it is about time for a test.

Take the ADD test: How focused is your organisation?

1. Does your organisation have a clear ambition for the future? And is it an ambition that employees are excited about and want to work for? Or is it an abstract management ambition? You can read more about this here.
2. Does your organisation have clear priorities? By this, I do not mean your strategic agenda, which I am sure is clear. I mean the two or three concrete things you want employees to focus their time and energy on.
3. Is your senior management sufficiently aligned on these priorities for the organisation? Or do employees in different business units get different messages about what is important?
4. Do you manage to keep the organisation focused on those priorities over a long period of time? Or do new goals and initiatives that are also important appear every time anyway?
5. Is there consistency between those priorities and what people actually see happening in the organisation? The choices you make? The investments you make? The people who get promoted? The projects that are important? The projects you stop doing because they are not in line with the priorities?
6. Are you showing concrete progress in realising your ambition for the future? Do employees notice that your story about this becomes more concrete every quarter? Or after two years, are you still talking in the abstractions that every strategic plan starts with (such as ‘we are going to put the customer first’)?
7. Is the implementation of the strategic plan also being completed intentionally? Or does one strategy slowly extinguish to make way (usually after a change of management) for the next plan?

If you answered no to some of these questions, there is a good chance that your employees are wading around in the swamp. If so, it is time to take action and make a conscious effort to focus.

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Dear leader… 
Under this title, we are reissuing a series of 10 classic blogs on leadership communication and change. Michiel van Delden wrote them over the last few years, translating key lessons from these two disciplines to the world of managers.