Increasing Your Impact with the Four Focuses of a Leader

Woman seated at table speaking with male colleague

As a healthcare leader, we know that you’re constantly pulled in so many directions throughout the day, confronted with competing priorities, and bogged down with numerous meetings and responsibilities that seem to never end.

Everything seems to be urgent and important and everything seems to be vying for your attention and your focus.

You've got all kinds of demands for your time and attention:

Meetings, Emails, and Phone calls
Providing care + service to your patients
Planning and scheduling
Rounding and coaching your employees
Working on projects
Implementing new processes
Improving quality and safety
Tracking budgets and timelines
Dealing with issues and problems

But the hard truth is, if we’re focused on everything, we aren’t actually focused on anything. 

We cannot focus on everything that demands our attention. And we can’t be successful as leaders with too wide of a focus. To excel in our role, we must intentionally narrow our focus to attend to what matters most.

The Power of Focus

A great example of the power of narrowing our focus is using a magnifying glass to start a fire.

The sun shines throughout the day without ever starting a fire, but once the power of the sun is focused through the lens onto the kindling, a fire starts almost immediately.

Focused intensity is immensely powerful and transforms whatever’s in its wake, even on the coldest of days.

That same intensity and focus must be applied to our leadership.

If our primary purpose—our one thing as leaders—is to find and develop the potential in people and processes, we need to focus only on those activities that grow ourselves, our teams, our patients, and our communities.

And, we need to burn away and remove anything that distracts us from that essential goal.

We need to zero in on what matters most, and to help us filter out what is and isn’t worthy of our attention, we only need to remember four things—resilience, engagement, experience, and innovation.

These four key areas are what we call the four focuses of a leader.

The Four Focuses of a Leader

When we’re improving our own abilities and building on our strengths, we’re instilling resilience.

When we’re growing our team’s abilities and building a better work environment for them to thrive, we’re increasing engagement.

When we work to elevate the health of our patients and give better service to our customers, we’re improving experience.

And, when we’re growing the operations of the organization and iterating to find a better way, we’re inspiring innovation.

No matter what type of organization we run or health system we work for, these four focuses of a leader will guide us on how to commit to what matters most.

Again those four focuses are:

Instilling personal and team resilience
Increasing employee engagement
Improving the patient and customer experience, and
Inspiring operational innovation

In our service-to-others approach, these four focuses set a clear trajectory toward making the exponential impact that’s possible with great leadership.

Maximizing Our Impact as Leaders

Our power as leaders flows from our overflow, and investing in these four focus areas will help ensure we have an abundance of resources available to pay it forward and deeply care for our patients, our community, and our teams.

Investing in ourselves and our personal resilience—or filling our own reservoirs of personal strength—will help us give more to our employees.

Employees who are well served by their leaders will have higher engagement and get to work on more connected and cohesive teams.

Buoyed by that supportive team, employees will have more to give to their customers and patients, improving the experience and creating transformational touchpoints.

That world class patient experience will only be possible through continual innovation which helps ensure we can deliver community-wide impact at scale.

Living the Four Focuses of a Leader

Let’s walk through some examples of how these four focuses play out in your leadership:

Resilience: Committing to resilience might involve building connections and community, strengthening well-being, and finding purpose and meaning.
Engagement: Increasing engagement will require us to provide clear and motivating leadership, to always be connecting, communicating, and coaching, and to design a cohesive, uplifting employee experience.
Experience: Leadership activities focused on experience include anything we do to elevate both the patient and customer experience, including enhancing the pre-patient experience through streamlined technology and providing better customer care.
Innovation: Innovating will include improving our processes, operations and services system-wide, increasing patient access, driving growth that is sustainable, substantial, and repeatable, and having impact at scale.

Our goal with Leadership Development at Level Ten is to help you expand your tool belt in each of these areas, help simplify your leadership, and help you build systems to easily align your teams around these four focuses.

When you simplify your focus, these principles soon become your north star, helping you to easily weed out and burn away what doesn’t serve your highest and best purpose as a leader, so you can stay committed to what will move you, your team, and your organization forward.

Going All-In with the Four Focuses of a Leader

The four focuses of a leader of resilience, engagement, experience, and innovation give us a laser-focused distillation of what activities we need to pursue to be the most successful and impactful leader we can be.

They provide guardrails and guidance for what work is essential to the success and mission of our organization, and what work is good, but really just a distraction.

To elevate our impact as leaders, we need to build these four focuses into our daily rhythms, using them to plan our days, set our long-term strategies and goals, and guide our 1:1s and conversations with our employees.

We need to let them guide every aspect of our leadership and align all of our efforts around these goals.

GAINING TRACTION WITH A SIMPLIFIED FOCUS

When we get all leaders aligned around these four focus areas, we become so much more powerful.

Instead of each of us rowing our own boat, on our own strength, in our own direction, we become one united team, rowing together with collective power and strength, charging ahead and accomplishing more than we could have ever dreamed.

It may be hard to see how only four focuses could be enough to meet the demands of everything that vies for your attention and your time. But, we challenge you to really consider each opportunity that comes across your desk and filter it through this "Four Focuses of a Leader" lens.

See how this simplified focus allows you to clear out everything that pulls you away from your greatest opportunities for impact and helps you gain far more traction than you’ve ever had before.

Take note of what you can accomplish with clarity and purpose and how your organization begins to grow as you more deeply invest in instilling a greater resilience for yourselves as leaders, in increasing the engagement of your teams, in improving the experience for your patients, and in inspiring operational innovation to benefit your organization and your communities.

We know you'll see great results from aligning your team around these four focus areas. To take your health system's leadership to the next level, contact our team to discuss launching a leadership development initiative today.