You can have a lot of projects going at once, but your mind can actually, your brain actually, not even your mind, your brain, the physiology of it, can only attend and focus to one thing at a time. And what great leaders do is they, and here’s the phrase, they lead people in ways that the people’s brains can actually follow them.
Have you ever wondered why some leaders get great results when others don’t when they kind of all do the same things? You know, leaders define a future and they engage talent and they go execute that and then they measure it. Then they hold people accountable and then they fix. Then they work this path over and over and over. But you see them all doing that. Some of them get results and some of them don’t.
Well, sometimes, what neuroscience has shown us is that leaders are leading people in ways that their brains cannot follow them. And yet, the great leaders do because they create, literally for people’s brains, the focused attention so people’s brains can work.
Now here’s the formula. You have this part of your brain called the pre-frontal cortex that does something called the executive functions of the brain. And it’s what you and your people need to do to be able to move anything from A to Z. If you’re going to hit a sales number, you’re going to create a product, you’re going to open up a market, you’re going to close a deal, or if you’re even going to drive your car to 7-Eleven, your brain has got to do three things. Three things.
Number one, it’s got to attend to what is relevant so it knows what to do. When you’re driving your car, you got to know there’s a relevant stimuli you got to attend to. What’s my speed? What cars are coming? What lane am I in? What’s my next turn? Number one, you’ve got to attend to the relevant stimuli.
Number two, you’ve got to inhibit everything else. You can’t be texting. You can’t be watching a video. You can’t have somebody screaming at you. You’ve got to be able to shut the rest of it out.
And the third thing is create a working memory. I can’t drop you out of time machine into a car and you know what to do next because you don’t know what you just did.
Great leaders do these three things in a multitude of ways. They have people focusing and attending on what is relevant and shutting everything else out. And they keep it current.
Steve Jobs was mentioned earlier, and when he came back to Apple, about simplicity, when he came back to Apple, it barely had a pulse, right? A few geeks in a [inaudible 00:02:39] somewhere used . . . Did I offend anybody when I . . . ? Apple wasn’t very big back then, again. But what he did was, he came back. And when he came back, the first thing he does is he starts walking the halls, and he finds out there’s like 30 versions of the Macintosh. And he’s asking the question, “So, if I want to tell my nephew to buy one, which one do I tell him to buy?” And there’s all this confusion and complexity.
So, he goes into a room one day, and in classic Steve Jobs style, and he screams. He says, “This is crazy! Here’s what we’re going to do . . . ” He goes to a white board, and he draws two columns and two rows and makes four boxes up on the white board. Across the top he writes “consumer” “professional” for each of the rows. “Consumer” and “Professional.” Down the side he writes “Desktop” and “Portable.” So, there’s four blocks. And he says, “That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make four computers. Consumer, professional, desktop, portable.” You go into an Apple store today, and that’s what you find.
See, what he did was he had them begin to attend to what’s really relevant, inhibit everything else, and he kept that in front of them all the time in a working memory. If you do this, your people’s brains will actually begin to follow. But this is not what we do a lot of times. It’s not what a lot of leaders do.
We have this off-site, we have all this focus, and we got all this. Then the next morning, it’s the next main thing in the inbox. A great opportunity that has nothing to do with what we just talked about. Not that new opportunities are bad, but we confuse people all the time. And remember, if everything is important, nothing’s important.
And what we know about the research shown goals, is that goals are primarily met, not because you want it bad enough. Desire is important. There’s a lot of people with desire and they are never able to reach that goal. The reason is desire will not do it. What they find about goals, people reaching goals is, one of the biggest factors that loads on it is not desire. It’s what gets prioritized. And if it becomes the attention and the focus, and people know what to attend to, and that’s what’s in front of them over and over and over, then it’ll happen.
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