Focus Means Saying No

Everyone knows that maintaining focus is essential to startup success, yet distractions are both tempting and endless. A vital tool for the startup leader’s toolbox is the ability to say no.

There are layers of focus in a startup. This post is all about managing the focus of a startup team.

Early in my startup career, I had the chance to witness the opposite of focus. I worked alongside a brilliant Ph.D. electrical engineer who had been tasked with at least a half dozen complex product development projects by the startup’s President. Week after week, I watched as he would pick up one project and advance the ball forward. But just as he began to generate momentum, he had to shift his attention to the next project. It was clear that he was creative and capable enough to make headway on whatever he was focused on, but the constant switching of concentration robbed all of his projects of progress and slowed everything down to a snail’s pace.  The root of the problem was that the startup’s leader would not make the hard decisions required to permit focus. The consequences were disastrous.

As a startup leader, I often feel like I am trying to juggle many balls simultaneously.  One of the hard things I must do on behalf of our team is to intentionally and continually decide what balls to keep in the air and what balls to let drop. I visualize this image when I am making prioritization decisions. I imagine those things we are deferring as balls I am choosing to let fall, and I give myself permission to let them roll around on the floor. Otherwise, the temptation is too great just to overload the team.

As a startup leader, my job is making the prioritization decisions that allow my team to develop and maintain momentum to realize a startup’s most significant advantages: innovation, agility, speed. There is never a shortage of value-adding things to do. The question I must continually ask myself is what the most value-adding things are at any given time?  Defer everything else for later.  Here are some of the ways I approach the challenges of prioritization and focus in a startup:

• Start by thinking about the big picture of your startup. What stage are you at, and what do you need to accomplish to raise more money, serve more customers, etc.? Success or failure on these proof points is often life or death for a startup, so you want to make sure to keep your focus on the levers that most impact those critical path items.  Use your broader context awareness to make the difficult choices about what balls to drop and avoid the trap of abdicating your responsibility with the futile hope the team can magically get everything done. 

• It is easier for a team to focus on fewer, bigger business objectives, so divide the work into logical, synergistic, well-defined goals and empower the team to develop and execute plans to achieve them.  By being clear about the why behind the objective, what decision filters to use, and what would characterize success, you can often unlock a team’s creativity in ways you might never imagine.

• Assess the capacity and unique skill sets of your team as you consider how to solve the resource contention inherent in prioritization. Challenge yourself to find the highest, best use of your rate-limiting resources and allow others to fill in around them.
  
  
• Distinguish between the urgent and the important.  In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey describes a two-by-two chart with urgency and importance as the dimensions. He recommends focusing on “Quadrant 2” which are those things that are both urgent AND important. I find this to be a useful framework when thinking about where to focus my team’s efforts. Unimportant things should be dropped, and less urgent things deferred.
  
  
• Be conscious of all the sources of focus distraction and vigilantly protect your team from it. Those distractions often come disguised as reasonable things to think about from your investors, from yourself, from helpful others, and even from customers.  The trouble is that the things that are raised can be off in terms of timing, synergy, and skill set capacity constraints.    

• Some projects have parts that are outside your control. When projects involve waiting on others outside of your organization, you can keep more of those in simultaneous flight as you weave different progress threads together. Success with this tactic usually requires that someone on the team is monitoring the flow of work for various projects and making adjustments to the prioritization along the way so that other members of the team can stay focused and effective on tasks that are ready to be acted upon.
  
  
• Some of my colleagues advocate for a singular focus, and while sometimes it is appropriate for an all-hands-on-deck push to accomplish some critical goal, most times this approach is too simplistic.  In fact, once your team reaches a certain size, you will need to juggle multiple interlocking goals that take advantage of pockets of resource and skill availability to accomplish several things at once. For example, in my current startup, certain highly technical tasks can only be tackled by specific team members who have the requisite skills. While the technical team tackles the work only they can do, we have other non-technical team members who can be working to advance our progress in other areas. This is the essence of divide and conquer! If we arbitrarily committed “the entire team” to a singular focus, some of the team would not have anything to do at least some of the time.

Protecting my startup team’s focus is essential to realizing our potential. Remember that it is a sign of success if you can deliberately choose to let some balls be on the floor.