Seth Dobbs (he/him): Whether at work where you volunteer or causes you might be active in, how do you prove your value and would you think differently about your answer if you were trying to prove value to your leadership? To your peers or to the people that you lead. What’s the key to success? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs and this is the Principle Driven Leadership podcast where I share principles of leadership Along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders, sometimes executives themselves.

And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you may be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create

durable results and leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves how narrowing your focus actually helps you become more successful. Years ago, I had an entrepreneurial type working for me at a medium ish sized organization. She had some small scale and solo efforts prior to joining us.

Now in our organization at the time, there is a lot of white space or a lot of opportunity. We had big appetite for what our company wanted to do. A lot of opportunity to kind of make that happen. And she felt she had a lot to offer in that environment, which I believe she did and wanted to show that she could do it all.

So because of that, she had what I think of as irons and lots of fires. Just a few examples. She organized an internal group to practice problem solving and would meet periodically to go through exercises and things like that. She worked on several client teams at the same time and wanted to be a strong contributor in all of them.

Thank you. And on top of that, was trying to develop new offerings and capabilities for our organization and go to market and sell them. So you can see this approach was trying to be essential in as many things as possible. And I get it. There are many organizations where it probably feels natural to assume that you succeed by taking on as many things as you can.

But there’s a couple problems with this approach. First, I think of it as, you’re not really defining yourself. This is something I’ll touch on in the future, but I’m pretty adamant about this concept that you should have a vision for yourself and the impact you want to have on the world around you and not just take on everything that comes your way.

But the second, and probably more important for this episode, by taking this approach of saying yes to everything, You become overwhelmed by too many things and swamped with busyness, so you might still be able to check things off a list, but you might not actually be making an impact. More specifically, with my team member, she started failing on multiple fronts.

The internal group doing the problem solving training. Never gathered enough momentum to make a difference. It was fun when the groups were gathered together, the exercises were great, people enjoyed it, and there were probably a few lessons learned out of it. But she was never able to make a real durable impact with this and raise people’s skills to the next level.

On the client front, her contributions were certainly solid, but she was sometimes absent at critical times for one client because she was often dealing with another client or trying to put the time in on developing and selling the new offerings. And on that front, she had fits and starts with the new offerings.

Some good ideas were certainly coming through, but she was struggling to get traction. Even though she prioritized this, with everything else she was trying to juggle in the air, she just couldn’t give this enough time. So the result of this, she had an underwhelming performance, in spite of trying to do everything she could get her hands on.

You might even see this as an all too familiar pattern, but fear not, you can redirect the way you think. And that’s by embracing this principle, doing less lets you achieve more. This might seem counterintuitive, so let’s, let’s parse this out a little bit. Let’s look at the two verbs in this principle, the two that I talk about the most throughout principle driven leadership, which is doing and achieving.

Doing less. It means just that. Stop thinking about just doing. Just doing is sort of the world of individual contribution, which is important, and I’m certainly, you have to do stuff, but if the only thing you think about is doing, you’re not really leading. Shifting your focus to achieving, it’s central to good leadership.

Achieving outcomes is what you want to do and what you want your team to do. Gaining laser focus on achieving a real impact makes it so much easier to actually make that impact. So instead of filling time, finding ways to be busy, having clarity of vision helps you focus all your energy and your team’s energy on the things that move you to the outcomes you’re actually trying to reach.

And therefore, It will greatly increase your chances of achieving them. So this means sort of developing the habit of not just saying yes to everything that comes your way. That doesn’t necessarily mean no to everything. It depends on your organization and what you’re really trying to achieve. You might have a yes, but is this new thing more important than this old thing?

Or will this get me towards the outcomes I’m trying to reach? It also means to not go in search of just more things to take on, especially if you, you, if you and your team haven’t achieved the things you’ve set out to achieve. Time and again, I have helped many people rise in their organization by coaching them to reduce their commitments.

That’s because you won’t be seen as essential if you overcommit and fail. Quite the opposite. So in the case of my team member, to help her with this, we discussed really narrowing the focus to creating the new offering and sales channels around it. This seemed to be something that she had a fairly unique ability in my organization to do and would have a significant impact on the organization if done well.

And it was what she was most excited about. So she embarked on this outcome to try to create a new offering sales channel, generate new revenue. At times she was frustrated, especially early on. I think she felt she had spare time that wasn’t enough just to occupy her and would ask things like, well, what else should I be doing?

So typically my answer was whatever it takes to make the new offering successful. Then we had revenue and margin targets to clarify that, but focusing all our energy on achieving that outcome. So as you start. Trying to work this way to think about the outcomes to focus less on doing and more on achieving.

You will start seeing if you, when you start getting this right, that you are effectively creating results, that you’re having the impact you want to have on the people you lead and your organization, your team are having the impact and creating the outcomes we’re trying to create. So we think about splitting our focus.

Think about a team, a rowing team, that are all, if we had them all trying to go in the same direction, they’re going to be far more effective. Then a team where each rower is headed for a different shore. You might want to reach all of those shores, but whether you’re trying to row yourself, you’re leading a team, you’re far more likely to reach all shores by going one at a time instead of trying to move your boat, your team and yourself in too many different directions at once.

So in the case of my team member, because we narrowed her focus to the key outcomes she wanted to make, we saw the effective results in the first year. Her concept went from nothing to a million dollar channel, and we actually won an award from a partner for the work we did. Remarkably, by focusing on fewer things, you can actually achieve more.

And this principle helps us get to that better refined why, which I find to be the most effective filter for limiting what you’re trying to achieve, understanding the why. So in my example, my leader didn’t have a clear why at the start. The why of just, I want to look good. It’s kind of hard to achieve when you don’t really tie that into something meaningful for the organization.

That’s why she was trying to get her hands on everything, but it wasn’t working. In the end, what she really wanted to do was have a material impact on our organization, on our revenue, and help us grow. A fairly simple, clear why. So we stripped down her focus to the business problems that she was most interested in trying to solve, and was aligned with my organization’s greater sense of purpose.

And then let her loose. Again, created that several million dollars of revenue ultimately in a small award winning team. Far cry from the floundering of where she started. She was getting in her own way by wanting to prove she could do it all instead of actually achieving what she wanted to achieve.

Looking at it a different way, doing more. It can actually result in you achieving less. You get so buried on checking things off the list. It’s easy to forget your why, the things you’re trying to create when you’re doing all that different kind of stuff. And you can spread yourself too thin and again be seen as someone that overcommits rather than someone that makes an impact.

But making an impact is really the measure of leadership, not just getting a bunch of stuff done. Doing less lets you achieve more because it helps you laser focus your efforts on the impact you want to have, giving you a why to filter out all the other things you could be doing. Now in the future, I’ll talk about how you can build on a foundation from narrowed focus to continue to grow and broaden your reach, but I’ll end here by asking, are you and your team achieving the things you need to achieve?

Think about all the things you and your team have on your plate right now, write them down and then ask yourself. One by one, why are you doing each one of these? Is it well aligned with your vision, with the outcomes you’re trying to create? And if not, why are you doing them? Thanks so much for joining me.

Please subscribe and tell a friend if you liked it. And join me next time where I’ll talk about why it’s important to shift from telling others what to do to inspiring them to embrace your vision.