Here’s the description for the Focus Theme from the Gallup Business Journal:
“Where am I headed?” you ask yourself. You ask this question every day. Guided by this theme of Focus, you need a clear destination. Lacking one, your life and your work can quickly become frustrating. And so each year, each month, and even each week you set goals. These goals then serve as your compass, helping you determine priorities and make the necessary corrections to get back on course. Your Focus is powerful because it forces you to filter; you instinctively evaluate whether or not a particular action will help you move toward your goal. Those that don’t are ignored. In the end, then, your Focus forces you to be efficient. Naturally, the flip side of this is that it causes you to become impatient with delays, obstacles, and even tangents, no matter how intriguing they appear to be. This makes you an extremely valuable team member. When others start to wander down other avenues, you bring them back to the main road. Your Focus reminds everyone that if something is not helping you move toward your destination, then it is not important. And if it is not important, then it is not worth your time. You keep everyone on point.”
I was coaching a friend recently who was sharing his frustrations about his boss and how the boss had many ideas and kept shifting the goal post! Now, Focus was his #1 talent theme, and this was a major source of frustration for him. Once the objectives was decided, he would dive into it, only to have the validity of the goal questioned and changed to another goal or even dropped altogether!
The clear destination is paramount to one with high Focus, and without a clear destination, someone with high Focus may be lost as to what to do or how to approach the situation. What determines the destination is influenced by the other dominate themes of the person, and also the value-system of the person.
How do we leverage on Focus then?
One possible approach (we always need to explore our approaches to see if it is suitable for the client), is to set a larger bigger goal, and to focus on the bigger picture. When we have a larger goal that is less likely to move, it helps the person with high focus to navigate the smaller changes within the larger goal better. A good strong shared-vision and mission statement (that the organisation lives up to) may help nurture this theme to perform better.
What’s your take on Focus? How do you manage moving targets?
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