Narrowing Focus To Identify True Priorities: How Companies Must Adopt an Overarching Objective They Can Build Around

Whether you’re at the workplace or home, every person knows that achieving goals isn’t a simple task. When you have a packed to-do list, items become disorganized, forgotten, and never completed. In business, this type of bottleneck threatens productivity and the long-term outcomes of an organization. Dr. Steve Steff, a transformational leader, executive coach, and President of Transforming Leadership, notes that narrowing your focus and identifying true priorities is the best solution to move forward.

If a mindset shift was the only thing holding managers and C-suite executives back from heightened performance, fewer people would struggle with this problem. The true challenge to set and actually meet a goal lies in the chaotic nature of modern workplaces. Employees on all levels have a never-ending set of tasks to complete. Many of them have tried to create some structure to get these things done. However, these improvements aren’t the same across the organization, creating pockets of underperforming departments. The solution? A standardized structure that transparently allocates tasks and holds stakeholders accountable for their responsibilities.

Dr. Steve notes that this system can be deeply transformational as long as businesses approach the strategy correctly. While everyone wants a magic strategy for responding to emails and completing assignments, narrowing focus and creating true priorities isn’t for small changes. The framework is meant to initiate holistic transformations past department silos. “Narrowing your workforce’s focus to a single true priority is meant to push organizational growth into overdrive,” says Dr. Steve. “It’s not about reaching a higher valuation or any other monetary goal. Your company’s true priority is supposed to have a significant impact on the business position years in the future. By changing fundamental parts of the business, the advantages of meeting your true priority are meant to continue providing advantages for quarters or years to come.”

Priming all aspects of your business to achieve your true priority greatly increases the likelihood of meeting your goals. Along the way though, more changes will need to be made. As supported by the Transforming Leaderships Proverbs book by Dr. Steve, true change only happens when all stakeholders have bought into the promise of these transitions. Without their collaboration, revolutionary change can never be unlocked. This is certainly true concerning transformation leadership because it coincides with creating a purpose tied to strategic company procedures and culture. Additionally, discovering new avenues for sustainable growth and correcting the business’ positioning is equally important.

According to Harvard Business Review, there are four main actions transformational leaders must take that are relevant when examining what your company’s true priority may be.

Taking stock is one of the most important steps to realizing what changes must be made. For businesses of all sizes, they must analyze the performance, positioning, and capabilities of their company down to the smallest detail. Cultivating this in-depth understanding of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, and future potential is critical for designing an effective roadmap of change.

Another helpful task transformative leaders must consider is the value of proximity. With the rise in remote work globally, leaders have come to realize the impact of distributed working teams. Without physical proximity, leaders often miss out on opportunities to have informal conversations and interactions with employees that are critical for relationship building. This trend showcases the importance of understanding the impact of proximity on leadership efficacy.

Customers, employees, and even C-suite executives all find value from others understanding their struggles, and building infrastructure that enables them to get the support or services they need to resolve a need. No matter what industry your business operates in, there are never-ending opportunities to explore organizational fringes that are underdeveloped.

The last two suggestions HBR makes talk about real issues that most companies underestimate when they commit themselves to transformation. The first problem involves systematically sharing leadership. A foundation can’t be deconstructed and rebuilt in a day, especially not without leveraging the collective intelligence, energy, and experience of your entire organization.

Since most transformations can take up to a decade to be finalized, businesses must examine how they can engage each individual in this process. When they get to that point, they should also consider the last suggestion in the article: empowerment. While many companies think they are future-focused and flexible companies, the article says that most companies have very static hierarchies that limit how large of a transformation can be made. Fostering transparency and accountability with your workforce is a great way to overcome this problem, and move towards your true priority goal.

Dr. Steve advocates for businesses to understand that transformative change is within reach if comprehensive strategies are used. Transforming Leadership, a leading transformational consultant and executive coaching provider demystifies the difficulties of transforming organizations and leadership through behavior monitoring and hands-on workshops.

“Your priorities are identified by your attention and behaviors as opposed to

where they fall on a list,” says Dr. Steve. “This is why people must consciously work to fulfill a priority and align their environment and mental state to influence action.”