As a business owner, there are so many things demanding your attention, and at the end of the day, it can be really easy to get overwhelmed when you are pulled in so many different directions. And as humans, the saying “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” is very accurate. You may have 15 important tasks on your to-do list, but when your marketing director walks into your office complaining loudly about a vendor or an issue, the other items fall to the wayside while you divert your attention to the problem in front of you. Even when the issue at hand isn’t really imperative to your growth or your bottom line and could likely be dealt with by someone else or at a later time. So, today I wanted to talk about how your attention (or lack thereof) is everything when it comes to business growth, and share tips on how to have a laser focus when it comes to important matters in your business.
Attention Equals Priorities
The things that you pay attention to in your business say everything about your priorities as a business leader and as a company. It is the value hierarchy of what you want to get done, the things that you have on your quarterly action plan, or even priorities for the week or month. If by chance your goal this quarter was to get your vendor relationships on a better footing and improve your pricing and delivery issues from those vendors, then the above issue would take precedence over everything else on your list. But if your goal this quarter was to improve your conversion rate with your sales team or improve your customer service department response times, then the time spent with the vendor wouldn’t be nearly as important as if you had used that time to train your staff to improve their close rates or response times. And in fact, you would be slowing down the growth of those departments by taking time away from them to deal with the vendor issue. Which is why it is so important to write down your priorities for the week, month and quarter and refer back to the list often to stay on track.
Consistency Is Key
Where you pay attention, where you actually focus your time, effort, and energy on any given day or week tells a lot about your priorities and your team will often follow suit. Because sometimes your behavior is very different from what you’re stating on your action plans or big rock reports. The very best leaders focus on the things that they say they will. The two are congruent one with the other, and I want to encourage you to look at where your attention lies and take a hard, honest look at how you handle distractions as a leader inside your business. Are you consistent? Do you stray often or contradict yourself when directing your team on their focuses for the quarter? If so, that should be the first thing you start focusing on to grow your business faster and help your team do the same.