The biggest error that leaders often make is to focus on the goal.
At no point between take off and landing is plane pointed at its destination
The biggest error that leaders often make is to focus on the goal.
Whether it’s personal goals or business goals, focusing on the goal pulls the focus right away from where it needs to be.
Lets take a fat loss goal to illustrate my point.
Adam wants to lose 10kg and keep it off forever.
His goal focus has him find the MOST effective approach to achieve the goal.
He eats chicken 🐔 and broccoli 🥦 for every meal and plans to do one hour of full body resistance training 4 times a week.
It takes him 40 days to achieve his objective, he feels amazing!
Fast forward another 40 days though and he’s put it all back on and some.
Although he was happy with his results he didn’t enjoy the process, and made sacrifices he wasn’t willing to make long term.
He’s now in a worse position than when he started. He’s not happy with how he looks, feels and performs and on top of that he has a lower opinion of himself and his abilities at least in this area.
Fold this into a business context and you can apply these problems (and results) to both yourself as a leader but also to your team.
A goal focus leads to an unhappy process, constant stress and overwhelm, the feeling that you are always behind, that you and your staff and never quite good enough or that the client is too demanding.
Now let’s look at a process focus.
You still have a goal of losing 10kg but your focus is on the process 99% of the time just like a pilot flying a plane.
You map out what’s important to you in your life that you do not want to sacrifice.
You decide on an enjoyable process that will move you towards your objective and fit into your life as you wish it to be.
It is not the BEST system but you enjoy it so you look forward to it and do it more often.
Because you do it more often you get better at it and start to master the processes involved like the exercise and the food preparation.
Mastery of the process means that the process has become automatic and you have constantly iterated so it takes you less and less time to achieve the same result.
It might have taken slightly longer to achieve the objective (it might not) but you are now a master of the process.
Again in a work context you and the team are happy, aligned, more masterful and feel in control.
Goals aren’t bad but as goal focus always is because it causes you to live in a future that doesn’t exist and never will.
Do you feel like you’re always chasing but never arrive?
Do you feel like you (or the people around you) are never quite good enough to achieve the current goal?
Do you feel like there is never quite enough time available?
Do you feel like life always gets in the way and halts or reverses your progress and that you need JUST a few clear, less busy, weeks without incident to get results?
If you just answered yes 4 times, is it time to acknowledge that your goal focus really isn’t working for you?
