Breaking the Endless Loop: Focusing Your Team and Company for Success

Are you feeling like your team is always behind? You hear constant complaints about workloads, prioritization exercises work for a week, everything is top priority, and balls are constantly dropped as communication channels break under pressure.

Usually that means you ask for more resources - and maybe you get them - though you just end up back where you started once the new hire's workload fills up or a new idea gets thrown your way.

Dang I should've put a trigger warning on this post, 'cause even just writing that out gave me heart palpitations!

The question is - why are we stuck in these endless loops of busyness and how do we get out of them?

Welp, as someone who partners with companies on their business and people operations and strategy (and has an appreciation of rhetorical questions, see above), I've found most of it comes down to focus.

And no - it's not that employees aren't focusing because they have work from home distractions, or just aren't working hard enough. And in that vein, if everyone needs to work 50+ hours just to get by, then your business model isn't working.

When I say focus, I mean organization-wide focus. Focus your business model. Focus your values. Focus your purpose and goals.

Employee focus is an outcome of company focus - unless you're setting a clear company wide purpose + explaining how you expect team members to execute (this is where values come in!), you'll have to keep prioritizing FOR your team. In a world where a competitor can pop up out of nowhere and a crises can start at the drop of a dime, we need to focus our strategy and operations at the company level so our teams can quickly and autonomously make day-to-day decisions.

I get it - focusing is freakin' hard, and you're possibly leaving money and/or success on the table each time you streamline your priorities. But thats business - you don't bet on every horse, you bet on the one you know is most poised to help you win (based on statistics, public sentiment, odds, and oftentimes a bit of gut).

My tl;dr metaphor is this: leading a company is like using a bow & arrow (see AI generated image of Diana the huntress for reference). In order to fly straight and far, we need to pull back and aim clearly, thoughtfully, and calmly and ensure that everyone around us knows where we're aiming and why.

Need help aiming (or figuring out where to aim)? I'll help you manage - reach out at catie@somehowimanageHR.com to talk about how we can partner to help your org succeed.