What Every Leader Should Focus On

First things first. What is focus?
Focus is the discipline to pay careful attention to the things that are relevant to your vision, mission, goal, objective, purpose, or existence.
Focus is a very important discipline for life and leadership and it produces the kind of energy that gets things done and produces results. It’s also proven itself over the years as the gateway to long-term effectiveness and productivity. Without focus, your investment of time, money, and effort will be haphazard and altogether unproductive.
When it comes to your personal and professional life, ask yourself: “what things am I focusing on?”
Your honest answer to that question will open your mind and your eyes to the realities of how you are leading your life and managing your affairs.
It will also give you clues as to why aspects of your life are growing, stagnant, or completely dead!
There’s no beating around the bush with this one, if you want growth in any area of your life, you will need to focus on those areas.

What to Focus on

So, what should you focus on as a leader who wants to be successful in their role?
In one simple word; Leadership.
“Is that it?” you might ask.
Yes, that is it. Focus on leadership.
I can come up with a bucket load of things that you should focus on as a leader but in reality, no one can really focus on many things at the same time and be guaranteed good outcomes. Plus, our world has enough distractions on offer that we have become spoilt for choice. So, my solution to staying focused as a leader and ‘nailing’ leadership for years to come is this: focus on leadership. It’s the one thing that matters most to your leadership existence and its steady progress.
Focusing on leadership will ensure that your decisions, behaviour, and actions are well aligned with what leadership is and what it seeks to achieve through you. It will ensure you develop values, culture, and policies that honour the integrity of leadership.
Furthermore, it will eliminate confusion as it relates to your role and the welfare of your social system.

How to Improve Your Ability to Focus on Leadership

There are a few things you can do that will help you improve your focus on leadership but I have come up with four meaningful ones. They act as guiding steps more or less and I call them IPAC.
1. Information: seek the right information about leadership. When you find it; receive it, understand it, and let it guide your behaviour and actions.
2. Purpose: know your purpose as a leader. Furthermore, know the purpose of the position you occupy (I mean this in terms of your work title or actual job description). When you know your purpose as a leader and the purpose of your position, go ahead and create a vision for your personal and professional life. Ensure it is one that aligns with the purpose you now know. Last but not least, let your short and long-term goals drip from the vision(s) you’ve created.
3. Action: be diligent in your good practice of leadership, ensuring your behaviour and actions portray leadership right. Function intelligently now that you know your purpose as a leader and you know the purpose of your position in your social system. Also, ensure you have strategies for achieving the goals you create and that you take the required steps to achieve them.
4. Commitment: keep leadership as the object of your focus and stay committed to it. Be consistent in upright values and in your desire to do good; let these two things that honour leadership shape your behaviour, actions and interactions.

As you learn the right things about leadership and you stay focused on it, you’ll be able to get rid of the distractions that threaten your long-term effectiveness and the progressive productivity of your team and/or social system.