Focus Pocus
Career insights from a former Googler
In sports, have you noticed when you take your eye off the ball, you likely miss it? The same can happen with your career or any life goal, for that matter. When we lose focus, things either get missed or begin to decline. It’s most noticeable with our health. When we take time and energy away from diet and exercise, we tend to lose muscle, flexibility, endurance and cardiovascular fitness (just to name a few). Over the years, I’ve noted a few observations when people take the focus off their careers (not limited to):
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- Disengagement. In the 70’s there was a commercial for doughnuts. It showed a man getting up in the morning, saying ‘time to make the doughnuts’. He’d get ready in a sleepy stupor, go to work and make the doughnuts. This whole routine would repeat again the next day and the next and so on. Until one day, he literally met himself coming home from work exclaiming, “I made the doughnuts”. I’ve noticed this often where people are asleep in their career routine because they have lost focus for various reasons. People just go through the motions and are not fully engaged. I call this the The Doughnuts Syndrome. Some frequent reasons I’ve heard for disengagement:
- Dislike the manager, boss, executive leadership
- Dislike the work content
- Unclear about vision, mission of the company, business unit or department; can’t see alignment between work and impact to the company
- Misalignment with company culture
- History of strong past performance; put career on cruise control
- Personal life priorities (which in most cases, is warranted, tip: just discuss with your manager proactively)
- Disengagement. In the 70’s there was a commercial for doughnuts. It showed a man getting up in the morning, saying ‘time to make the doughnuts’. He’d get ready in a sleepy stupor, go to work and make the doughnuts. This whole routine would repeat again the next day and the next and so on. Until one day, he literally met himself coming home from work exclaiming, “I made the doughnuts”. I’ve noticed this often where people are asleep in their career routine because they have lost focus for various reasons. People just go through the motions and are not fully engaged. I call this the The Doughnuts Syndrome. Some frequent reasons I’ve heard for disengagement:
- Performance Decline. Typically, but not tightly correlated, when disengagement starts to happen it’s not uncommon to see a decline in the quality of one’s work product. Managers are usually quick to recognize when this starts to happen. Effective managers create a culture of continuous feedback, so hopefully a productive and balanced conversation ensues.
- Emotional Spectrum. This is an interesting one. Have you heard the expression ‘gamut of emotions’? It means a full or complete range. Disengagement usually has an emotional component, like boredom, malaise, frustration, fear, anxiety, and sometimes anger. In working with clients, what I’ve noticed is the longer a person is in a role (or company) that is no longer a good fit, the intensity of the emotion associated with disengagement increases over time. They get more bored or more angry, for example. I’ve also seen people who may not be disengaged, but are bored or lost the passion for the work or industry. They can be so amazing at their jobs, true subject matter experts, that being partially engaged is good enough for the company. In whichever case, I firmly believe we stay in situations until it is too uncomfortable or we get a wake-up call; like a performance improvement plan, a health scare, or recruited for a new opportunity.
So, is it important to maintain focus, especially if you want to have an impactful, fulfilling career? Yes!
Let me remind you of the four requisitions for change: 1) Getting out of your way. 2) Getting clear on what you want to do. 3) Focus and 4) Action. These are not new or revolutionary ideas, yet if we really assess whether or not we have all four components, we usually find that there are items missing or they are not detailed enough.
I’ve talked about 1) Getting out of your way and 2) Getting clear on what you want to do. The premise behind focus is where attention goes energy flows! How can you check your focus? Do an honest self assessment.
Are you noticing any disengagement? Are you just making the doughnuts, phoning it in?
How are you feeling, on average, in any given week? Are you just ‘meh’ or do you loathe going into the office everyday?
Based on your answers, it may be time to make some changes, whether minor or major. Talking with your trusted advisor(s), mentor or coach can be a helpful next step.
I hope you found my observations on career focus helpful. As adults we spend the bulk of our waking hours ‘at work’. We only have a finite amount of time on this planet, and you can choose how to spend that time. I wish you much success on your career quest. Yours in balance, learning, growth and harmony. – Melissa DeLuca, CEO
