Are you a wandering leader?

Focus means understanding what your priorities are in any given hour, day, month, quarter or year.  Without focus, it's easy to wander – it's easy to become reactive instead of proactive – it's easy to fail.  ~Dave Kerpen

I've written about focus before, but it's so critical someone could dedicate an entire blog to the topic.  The quote I chose this week comes from a paragraph in a blog by Dave Kerpen.  Here's the paragraph in its entirety.

Focus means understanding what your priorities are in any given hour, day, month, quarter or year. Focus means knowing what's most important - product, service, hiring, fundraising, sales or innovation, and then concentrating on that one thing. Focus means knowing what's not as important in any given time period. Without focus, it's easy to wander - it's easy to become reactive instead of proactive - it's easy to fail. With focus and determination, you and your team will understand what's most important, and help you execute - to success.

Have you ever tried to follow someone who's wandering?  Maybe you've been driving somewhere and you're trying to follow another driver who doesn't have precise directions and is trying to find the destination by instinct.  Or, speaking from experience, your dog gets lose in a large city park and darts back and forth and around in unexpected places.  The point is, it's not easy to follow someone who's wandering, it's frustrating, and many times it feels like a real waste of time.

Focus is a way of being, it's constantly making judgments, it's being intentionally proactive and not reactive.  It means you understand what your priorities are at any given moment.

Years ago I was the director of marketing for a college.  We not only led the college's external marketing efforts but we also served as a resource for other internal departments.  We did our best to provide responsive customer service to our colleagues.  However, after enduring much frustration I had to change this policy for one of the vice presidents.  I discovered that he was a wanderer.  He would come to us with a request and we'd jump right on it.  We'd get it completed, sometimes in record time, and when I'd deliver the completed product he would actually sometimes say, "What's this for?"  In his wandering style of leadership he would have already moved on to another idea, I think sometimes within hours, but failed to let us know.  The new policy I established for this VP was that we would begin his requests only after he asked for the same thing at least three times.  That would be our indicator that he wasn't "wandering" and actually had some focus.     

Establishing and communicating priorities (aka: providing focus) is a crucial part of leadership. With so many opportunities, possibilities, and options available to all organizations today, it takes very little for some of us to start wandering.

Does your team know what's most important?  Do they know what's most important this year?  This quarter?  This month?  This day?  Yes, even this hour?  Or are you wandering?