There are many lessons to be learned on the importance of focus, a crucial element in all aspects of life: whether it be at work, at play, or even socially. What are some of the benefits?
"Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus." - Alexander Graham Bell
1. Challenges Can Spur Solutions
The first benefit of focus comes as a result of facing larger challenges. When we face these larger challenges, it can either spur us on or break us down, as individuals or as a team. The lesson to be extracted, like that rich vein of gold, is that challenges can spur solutions and innovation. Use tools and techniques like brain-storming and prioritizing to empower individuals and team-members to remove any distractions that stand in the way.
2. Focus Delineates Central Problems
The second benefit I will impart is that focus can allow individuals or a team to clearly delineate the problems central to the challenge in a clear and effective manner. Maintaining focus, the team or individuals rise to the occasion, detailing internal causes that may manifest themselves as a problem. As stretching is to an athlete, so is maintaining focus to an achiever - it brings cohesion to the team, and ease in relations between team members. Support for each team member will follow.
3. Focus Leverages Individual Strength For Group Aims
The third benefit of focus is in its ability to leverage individual strength. In a business team, development may focus on corporate branding, while finance focuses on efficient management of financial resources. Such specialization lies at the genius of post-industrial capitalism, and as such has provided great advances in quality of life and the strength of an organization by maximizing effort.
4. Team Focus Elevates Us All
The final benefit of focus is that it sublimates individual urges for collective good, while also providing many positive results for individuals. Methods to overcome roadblocks include conditioning team members to accept constructive feedback as positive and enriching, monitoring team development, and celebrating team achievements. This leads to better effort in the here and now as well as along the line, and gives the individual a feeling of satisfaction and well-being that can only come from being part of a striving and achieving whole, which values his or her contribution.
Jim Reid is a project manager for a paper distribution company in Des Moines, Iowa.
