Our beloved dog Watson has loads of terrier in his mixed genetics, so he’s consumed with all things rodent and rabbit on the ground and under the ground. He has an instinctive intensity when he catches a whiff of something interesting. Watson has often been so focused on an old rabbit scent that he doesn’t see the rabbit 8 feet upwind. I’ve witnessed him oblivious to squirrels darting across the sidewalk just ahead because he’s head down trying to inhale a vole from its hole.
This is not Watson, but this is a common scene on our morning walks:
People have these tendencies, too. We can become intensely focused on one thing and miss the larger perspective, which includes both threats and opportunities.
This becomes a leadership issue in several dimensions:
- Occasionally we must remind a person to sharpen their focus, rather than frequent task-switching and head-swiveling without delivering a result. A sustained hard focus generates results.
- More often we need to help people to change their focal point, to look up and out. There’s a larger world of information. There may be a new priority for their focused attention. Leaders should frequently use the opportunity to help people connect immediate work with grand purposes.
- Good leaders arrange for their subordinates to do more of the focused work, and spend more time in situational awareness and anticipating the next thing. They don’t do someone’s work for them, apart from extraordinary circumstances. That energy is better spent by leaders to expand the radius of their watch-zone.
In practical business situations, leadership is a both-and challenge of selectively focusing while maintaining a soft focus situational awareness, and more dedicated time in larger picture view. I’ve coached myself and others to book time on their calendars, weekly and monthly, for the explicit purpose for looking up and out. Want to move faster? Increase the frequency of those times.
