What a summer of sport it has been. The football World Cup, a fortnight at Wimbledon, Formula One, the athletics, and in among all of it, my son, Will, out competing on the international shooting circuit.
But what actually sits underneath performances like that? What makes one person a winner in a crowded competitive field? It’s almost never one single dramatic moment, luck on the day, or talent alone. It comes down to small things done repeatedly; to attention pointed at the right place at the right time.
The same is true of leadership.
Elite sport runs on the 1%
At elite level, success is often found in the pursuit of marginal gains: consistent focus, small improvements, habits and decisions that accumulate. It’s the continual search for the extra 1% that compounds over time.
Take Will. When he competes, every shot demands complete focus on that moment in time. Thinking about the previous shot, the score or where he might finish is an immediate distraction.
At his first senior competition he found himself shooting alongside Olympic medallists. In India, he shot through a torrential downpour. While I stood there worrying about everything I had no control over, including the prescription glasses that had become unusable, he adapted, focused on the next target and finished with a personal best.
You could see the same thing at the World Cup. England were minutes from the final when their attention moved from playing the next pass to protecting the lead. It went. Three days later, in the third-place play-off, they played with complete freedom and scored six. Nobody got better in seventy-two hours; their attention moved.
That should be a relief to any leader, not a worry. Nobody has ever changed an organisation with a single grand intervention. What changes it are the small things you keep doing when you’re busiest: the one-to-one you refuse to cancel, the feedback you give the same day rather than saving it for an upcoming review.
What you can control, and what you cannot
External noise has a lot to answer for. In sport it’s crowd behaviour, media pressure, weather or the significance of the occasion. In leadership it’s organisational politics, economic uncertainty, technology, constant notifications and the pressure to do three things at once.
Stephen Covey wrote about focusing only on what you can control in his first habit: be proactive. He called it the circle of influence, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and the discipline is simply noticing which circle you’re standing in.
Leaders lose that discipline constantly, if not obviously. The most common complaint I hear about managers is not that they’re unkind or unclear. It’s that although they were in the same room, they weren’t really in the conversation. Phone face up, the next meeting already in play, attention on everything going on around them rather than the person in front of them. Modern working life trains that out of us, which is why your complete attention has become so rare and valuable.
If you want somewhere to start:
- Decide your one job before you walk into a conversation, then do only that.
- Leave your phone outside the room, not just face down on the table.
- Name the distracting noise out loud, then name the part of it you can actually change.
- Read something for twenty minutes. It’s one of the few things left that won’t let you do anything else at the same time.
- Choose one 1% habit for September. Just one, not five.
It doesn’t need to be complicated. Protecting your attention works like everything else that matters: it’s built in small decisions nobody applauds.
Business is supposed to switch off in August, and some of it does. Before the diary fills up again, ask where your attention is going, and whether it’s going to make the difference you want it to.
If you would like help building that discipline across your leadership team, this is how we approach leadership development. Get in touch if you’d like to chat about how we can help to shape your leadership skills.