Seemingly against all the odds, Dorothy prevailed! This calm, yet determined COO of a multi-site women’s apparel subcontractor had steered her organization through both an industry-wide downturn, and the larger recent period of economic malaise. They had survived and even grown to thrive over the two and a half years of withering challenges and changes.
Indeed, Dorothy sounded tired yet gratified when we spoke recently in a final coaching session, and she surprised me a bit with a one-word answer to my question: “What did you feel was the most critical thing that enabled your workers to weather the recent buffeting changes and threats to their survival?”
“Focus,” she said quickly and emphatically. “All across the company, throughout these months, we were able to maintain an almost single-minded, consistent attention on our elevated expectations for ourselves.” It turns out this is not such an outlier comment or finding.
The following quote precedes Winifred Gallagher’s Introduction to her engaging book titled Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (2009): “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” – William James.
Gallagher’s thesis throughout is that a wide range of disciplines have amassed evidence that skillful management of attention—the maintenance of focus on desired goals and expectations for their outcomes—largely determines what we get from our efforts.
In my book, Power Up: The Guide to Leadership Coaching with Strengths (2012), I note that the four classical and familiar “effects” known to most of us from both our reading and experience over the years have long underscored the validity of that assertion. These four effects are the Placebo, Pygmalion, Pareto, and Hawthorne effects.
Scrutiny of each effect yields a common conclusion: When we concentrate almost “monomaniacally” (as Steve Jobs often described it) on a key goal and its attendant behaviors, then we set our gaze and our mindset on affirmative actions in their pursuit, and thereby are likelier to achieve our consequent desired outcomes.
This stream of thought has been promoted and confirmed in a wide range of writings over the past 50 years from such works as Built to Last to The 4 Disciplines of Execution and Juran & Deming’s TQM, as well as modern worker motivation theory as seen in the pivotal work of Deci & Ryan, not to mention the latest findings about our mind and the brain’s neuroplasticity.
In all these classic works and diverse areas of endeavor, Dorothy’s comment finds support and validation—just as her workers found. Our lives and our work depend most heavily not on our skills, intelligence, fame, or fortune, but on what we choose to pay attention to and where we focus our energy and resolve. Managers and their employees both can profit from giving this idea and its practice their fullest attention.
