How to Focus a Team
Focus on the most important activity and develop trust and mutual understanding
Keeping your people focused on important and useful activity is an essential aspect of leadership. Without support people will often waste time on irrelevant or low impact work.
Neil Jurd OBE explains why focus is important and provides a simple and very effective way for keeping your people and teams on track.
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What's this video about?
In his talk, Neil emphasises the fundamental importance of leaders and teams focusing on the most impactful and relevant work to achieve a common goal. He defines leadership as engaging others intellectually and emotionally to achieve more than could be accomplished alone. Neil explains how in well-led organisations, efforts are aligned towards a Clear and Compelling Purpose, but often this isn’t the case. Misalignment can occur due to misunderstandings, differing priorities, or self-interest, leading to wasted resources on irrelevant activities.
Neil suggests that if activities don’t align with the Clear and Compelling Purpose, then either the activities or the purpose itself is flawed. He explains that leaders must ensure the purpose is correct to prevent resources being wasted and useless tasks being completed. To ensure this, he proposes a method where teams identify their top three projects and score them on impact and relevance to the common purpose. By multiplying these scores, projects can be ranked from 1 to 100, with high-impact and highly relevant projects scoring the highest. This method helps to prioritise work that truly contributes to the organisation’s goals, resulting in the team running more efficiently.
To further increase efficiency, Neil recommends using visual aids, such as the Impact x Relevance scoring method during team planning sessions to improve understanding and create discussion. He explains this approach to focus efforts on essential work and to create mutual understanding and increase communication within the team.
Neil concludes his talk by encouraging you to reflect on how you can apply this to your own organisations and teams, and explaining a high performing team as one in which everyone is focused on the same purpose.
