CULTURE KILLERS: Losing Focus
Losing Focus
Focus is one of the hardest things to do when building something new, and also one of the most important. This edition of CULTURE KILLERS discusses how Losing Focus can have unintended consequences on company culture.
Startups are full of distractions. People who like to build new things are great at coming up with even more things to build. And the opportunity to find new use cases for a new product is seemingly endless.
Losing Focus creates a host of business problems. They are real, and they can destroy companies. A 10 second internet search will give you hundreds of articles about why your strategy can die without focus. We are focused instead on the underlying damage to culture that comes from Losing Focus.
Culture stems from the integration of strategy, operations, and people. Strategy is the vision for the future - where you want to be and how you plan to get there. It is the North Star. It drives operations and helps determine what the right team will look like. Losing Focus means forgoing strategy. It creates chaos and distorts visions. Without focus, there is no chance at creating a cohesive culture.
People need to know that their work matters. Losing Focus makes it hard to show people their work matters, because what they did one day may be ‘out of vogue’ the next. Many people go to early stage companies because they care about the problems that innovation can solve. Losing Focus means that the new problem may be out of line with the original reason that an employee joined the company, and when people are not passionate about the problem they are solving for, they leave.
Losing Focus creates silos. People start to build teams aligned to various projects. People choose alliances based on their view of what the best opportunity is and they stop collaborating with people who they think are wasting their time on a project / product / use case that is less valuable.
Work quality goes down. One of our favorite analogies came from a client who worked in agriculture and grew up on a farm. He was running a big project and said ‘every time you pick up a rock, there’s a whole new ecosystem down there that you didn’t know existed until right now!’ Said differently, the deeper you go into a problem, the more complexities you will find. When people Lose Focus, they stop paying attention to these complexities and do not take the time to dive into the small details that matter. Details can determine whether a new product is viable.
Entitlement goes up. Without clear priorities that go across the company, people realize that they can choose their own adventure and do what they want to do.
Trust goes down. People question which team others are on, why others have different priorities, whether they are all working from the same information or working towards the same goals.
And the ongoing operational problems only exacerbate these issues. When companies Lose Focus, it is hard to hire the right people or set consistent expectations. People end up in jobs that are totally different from what they wanted to be doing, or people are hired to do things that really should not be done.
It is not easy to stay focused. It is also a business imperative. The best way to do it is to regularly review strategy, operations, and people and ask if they are truly integrated. Everyone needs to be actually rowing in the same direction.
More about the CULTURE KILLER Series
Every founder wants their company to be known for its culture. Every employee wants to work in a place that they love. To succeed, every startup needs a Culture that Works.
Culture is so much more than a list of random perks. It results from how a company implements its strategy across its organization, how it runs its business every day, and how it manages its people. Culture is hard to build and fragile once established.
Around every corner is a CULTURE KILLER that can derail you and your company. In this series, we’re sharing some of our favorite examples and discussing the bigger underlying issues that are easily missed but must be fixed.
