3 Ways to Focus Your Attention at Work
Psychologist Daniel Goleman is perhaps best known for his book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” (“EI”). Published in 2012, “EI” delineates the five crucial skills of emotional intelligence, and illustrates how they determine our success in relationships, work, and even our physical well-being. One of Goleman’s more recent books, “Focus: The Hidden Driver Of Excellence” (“Focus”), came out three years post — and to less acclaim than — “EI”. I’ve shared “Focus” with my e-team and believe it provides a helpful framework for how managers can help team members grow both personally and professionally by focusing (pun intended!) on three important areas of development that Goleman describes as “Inner”, “Other”, and “Outer”.
Inner Focus: Self Awareness
Socrates and Plato both get credit for their use of the phrase “know thyself”. Often lost today is the effort by all of us to really explore internally what constitute our strengths and, as importantly, what constitute our weaknesses. Many of us get caught up in the popular narrative that to lead effectively we must be masters of every domain. That’s utter nonsense. As a CEO, I came to the realization long ago that among my many weaknesses, being able to effectively do any specific job that my e-team oversees — from engineering to product management to B2B marketing to sales — makes up a large part of my “weaknesses” list. Indeed, Goleman cites an Accenture study that found that, “Chief executives need this ability to assess their own strengths and weaknesses, and so surround themselves with a team of people whose strengths in those core abilities complement their own.” Thus, start with doing a real inventory of what you do well — and what you don’t — so you may focus on the former, and align with others who can help shore up the latter. Develop some humility, less ego, and know thyself.
Other Focus: Empathy
Empathy may be the word of the decade, and yet it’s often misunderstood in terms of its various depths. Goleman describes three important levels, “…cognitive empathy…let’s us take other people’s perspective…with emotional empathy we join the other person feeling along with him or her…empathetic concern, goes further, leading us to care about them, mobilizing us to help if need be.” One concern for the modern workplace rests with how deep any of us truly dives into the empathetic spectrum. Given the pace of today’s information-driven and social media-laden lifestyle, it’s easy for us to check the box on cognitive empathy (if that) and move on.
This isn’t good enough. To build meaningful relationships with those whom we work, manage, and ultimately lead, we must aspire to build those empathy muscles that delve into the realm of empathetic concern. Goleman writes that, “Most competencies for high performing leaders fall into a more visible category that builds on empathy: relationship strengths like influence and persuasion, teamwork and cooperation, and the like.” Agreed. However, these offshoots of empathy resonate most deeply when built on a foundation of authentic empathetic concern between individuals versus a more shallow level of empathy that’s only rooted at a cognitive or slightly deeper level.
Outer Focus: Systems Thinking
Systems thinking, the final leg of Goleman’s focus triad, defines the biggest challenge for aspiring leaders and managers. Everything today stilts to the transactional. Many of us are trapped in a mindset driven by questions like: “What’s my punch list of “to do” items? How can I cross off what’s next on my list and move on?” Indeed, I’ve met many brilliant, highly educated people who have developed what I describe as an amazing ability to view the world through a pair of near-sighted glasses. They can plan the road ahead up to the point where the road starts to disappear into the horizon.
What they lack and need to work on is the commensurate ability to slip on a pair of farsighted glasses so they can see the big picture and imagine where the road goes beyond the horizon. They need to develop their own ability to see the proverbial “forest for the trees.” I quite like Goleman’s use of the term “systems thinking” and how he labels one of the chapters in the book “Patterns, Systems, and Messes”. Leaders and managers play an instrumental role in pushing those they lead and manage to periodically invest time intentionally working to develop one’s “…ability to visualize the dynamics of complex systems and foresee how a decision at one point will ramify to create an effect at a distant one, or sense how what we do today will matter in five weeks, or in months, years, or decades.”
Being able to combine a high level of self-awareness per one’s “inner” compass with an empathetic concern to relationship building with “others” brings each of us quite far in developing a capability to periodically step back and focus our attention on the “outer” systems that surround us and ultimately matter most when it comes to creating transformational change. This attention and desire to parse these three important themes allow us as leaders, managers, and team members to sift through the noise of information overload and to develop our own unique abilities to know our strengths, empathize with our colleagues, and think more broadly about the bigger ecosystems in which we live and work.
Originally published on Medium on May 26, 2018. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.