Focus

Today’s advice: limit the essential elements of your leadership to a vital few. Listen as Ralph and Bill discuss the critical importance of focus, and learn how you can sharpen your focus to optimize your leadership, and ultimately energize your team or organization.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast. This is the space where we discuss leadership, team and organizational topics and better practices. We like to provide concepts and ideas that you can turn into pragmatic experiments to help you develop your higher potential in your work and your leadership. I’m

Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel: So, Ralph, we’re talking about the topic of focus.

Ralph Simone: I love this topic.

Bill Berthel: You do?

Bill Berthel Simone: Oh, yeah. This is what I call one of my natural gifts, one of my unique strengths, the ability to focus.

Bill Berthel: Well, I’m ready to learn a lot from you because I see it as a, pretty significant gap for myself. So I’m excited about this one.

Ralph Simone: I think the gap exists for all of us, including me. But I want to start with a story because I think this story, coming from a client experience, puts this in perspective. The challenge that we have. I was doing a meeting between a manager and a leader who we are coaching. And they had three goals for the coaching process. One was to improve their ability to hold others accountable.

Bill Berthel: Okay.

Ralph Simone: The second was to get their arms around the 10,000 things that they have to do. Now, I’m sure it was hyperbolic. However, I very quickly pointed out if they saw the relationship between the inability to hold people accountable and, the 10,000 things they have to do.

Bill Berthel: Oh, interesting. Probably a correlation between accountability and the number of things we have to do and the capacity we have to do them in.

Ralph Simone: Yeah. So which things do I focus on? What do I follow up on? What is okay to let go of? And I think organizations are constantly, they have so many things, and this is where focus comes in. And I play around with this. I love to play around with variations of. I think this is a variation of either an Emerson or a Thoreau quote. But focus, focus, focus. Make the essential elements of your life and your leadership number a vital few. We think we have this infinite capacity that we can do more. The more automated things become, the more things we think we can do. And I think it’s causing us to lose that discipline of really focusing on those essential items.

Bill Berthel: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think we’re well intended. Right. We have a lot of interest. We want to get a lot of things done. We see a lot of opportunities. But even with that good intention, we’re overwhelming the capacity of our resources. And so focus is a way to get it back to what you call it, the vital few.

Ralph Simone: The vital few. I like to get Paredo in the mix.

Bill Berthel: Right.

Ralph Simone: Wilfredo Paredo, the Italian economist who studied the unequal distribution of wealth, 20% of our tasks yield 80% of our results, 20% of our customers. And we seem to intellectually know that. I hear people talking about it all the time, and yet we’re trying to do everything. And I remember some of my Covey training. He said, if we see everything as important, we try to do everything. And what do we get? We get overwhelmed.

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