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MAINTAIN FOCUS

In order to stay on top, leaders must keep their focus.

This sounds simple, but for many leaders, it’s their toughest challenge.

People lose focus all the time. Groups lose focus. Companies lose focus.

Look at Kodak, which dominated film for so long that they began to believe they never could be caught, until the technology changed and hurt them considerably. Look at IBM, which also was slow to deal with changing technology. In a sense, they both lost the fundamentals that made them successful in the first place.

Companies do this all the time and people do this all the time.

For example, take the person who becomes successful after years of hard work. Let’s say that for years he played golf on Saturday mornings. That was his time away from the ringing telephone and the demands of work. Away from his family. Those four hours every Saturday morning were his little sanctuary, his personal reward for all the hard work and long hours he spent at his job.

Now, though, he feels like he deserves another reward. Because he’s worked hard and he’s been successful, right? So he adds another round of golf on Wednesday afternoons. And that’s eventually followed by another round of golf on Friday afternoons, too. This becomes another day he leaves work early, another day he rewards himself.

So what began innocently enough as one round of golf a week on Saturday morning, the reward for all his hard work, has now turned into three rounds of golf a week. What began as something peripheral to his week has now become a significant part of his life.

You see this a lot with college coaches who’ve become very successful. Usually, this has taken a long time to accomplish, a lot of years and a lot of work, summers spent either recruiting or working summer camps, a lot of years of paying dues. Long hours and few vacations: the long road people travel to become successful. Then they reach their mountaintop and so often many of them simply don’t want to work so hard anymore. They feel they shouldn’t have to. To the victor belongs the spoils, right? Now the first thing they do is they take more time off. They see this as something they’re entitled to, a payback for all their hard work, so they don’t recruit as hard. They don’t make that extra call. They don’t put in as many hours. They don’t interrupt their vacation to go to that summer camp where many of the best recruits are, like they did when they were on the way up, dreaming of getting to the top. They rely more and more on their assistant coaches to do what they used to do. They don’t go the extra mile the way they used to.

And what is it that invariably happens?

Their performance starts to suffer.

Why?

Because they’ve lost that eye of the tiger, the focus that made them so successful in the first place. They’ve lost those fundamentals. And when you lose your fundamentals the result is both a soft body and a soft mind.

You see it with companies who have become very successful. They have had great vision and have seen it actualized. They have grown and prospered, reached a height that once would have been unimaginable. Then they get complacent, begin to luxuriate in their own success. In very subtle ways they aren’t as hungry anymore. They get fat. They get lazy. And eventually things begin to change. Eventually, they begin to get caught by their competition, the ones that still are hungry, still are trying to get to the top of the mountaintop.

MAINTAIN DISCIPLINE

Why do people lose their focus?

Many reasons. A lack of fundamentals. Boredom. Complacency. The feeling they need another challenge. It’s human nature.

It’s at these times of success when you have to work at being more focused.

Focus is a discipline. You can train yourself to get better at it, just as you can train yourself to work harder, be more organized, and manage your time better. Now you also can learn to recognize those times when focus can be very fragile. Three situations immediately come to mind:

The first is when the newness wears off. You often see that with kids in school. They go back in September full of good intentions. They begin the school year by being organized, keeping up with their homework, swept along by their good intentions. Then about a month into it, they hit the wall. The newness is gone. They begin to slide back into their old habits. That sharp sense of focus they began the school year with is already gone.

People do this all the time, whether it’s with diets, New Year’s resolutions, fitness programs, a renewed commitment to their jobs, whatever. They begin with great intentions, ride that for a while, and then start to slide. Once the newness wears off, focus will start to wear off, too.

The second? When there has been a success.

The example is people on diets. They are disciplined and organized, see results, then figure they can reward themselves. Haven’t they been good? Hasn’t the diet worked? Don’t they deserve a hot fudge sundae every once in a while? Can’t they take a few days off from their diet? Don’t they deserve this?

You don’t have to be Columbo to see the obvious trap. These people have embraced success. And once that happens their focus will suffer, too.

The third situation where focus starts to slip is when you simply don’t have the time. During those periods when you feel as if you’re being pulled in a hundred different directions it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose focus. There are too many things on your plate and there’s no way you can do justice to all of them, right?

A good example of this is with my own job:

When I became the president of the Celtics in May of 1997, there was some speculation that I was in uncharted territory, that though I was a successful coach I had never really run an organization before. I didn’t believe this. I always had considered myself the director of Kentucky basketball, that even though we had an athletic director at the University of Kentucky, my responsibility was the basketball program and that was similar to running a company. I had media demands, public relations demands, constant demands on my time. In essence, I was doing everything a CEO would do, except without the title.

One of the false impressions I had when I first came to the Celtics, though, was that there was a lack of leadership at the top, and that I was going to have to overhaul the entire organization. That was the assumption I brought with me to the job, but it was a wrong one.

I soon realized that I didn’t have to integrate a whole new corporate strategy and that so many things were already in place: the sales people, the marketing people, the people who handled community service. These things were running well, so there was no reason to change them. The best thing I could do was to step back and let these people continue to do what they already were doing.

That was a major plus. Still, I have obvious time constraints. First and foremost, I have to make the Celtics a better basketball team. Everything else is subordinate to that. It’s analogous to opening a new restaurant. Yes, you need the dining room to have the right ambiance, and the waitpeople to be efficient and professional. Yes, you want a great location. But while these things may get you initial business, if your food is sub-par all these things eventually become irrelevant.

So I went to the people in marketing, the people in promotion, the people in the various departments, and said, “Here’s how I can help you. These are my skills and it’s up to you to utilize them. I can’t tell you how to do it, but here’s the time I have, here are the skills I have, and you have to tell me what to do.”

Doing that accomplished two things:

It not only showed these people in the various departments that I had faith in them, but it also allowed me to maintain my focus. Instead of being pulled in many different directions, I was able to focus in on the task at hand.

As the leader of the Celtics, it is important for me to communicate focus to those I lead: I make myself available to our marketing and promotional people whenever possible. Often, I will meet groups of season ticket holders before home games in the FleetCenter. Sometimes it’s for only a few minutes, but I feel that these things are imperative. My rule is simple: I will go anywhere, and do anything, to promote the Boston Celtics.

Here is what we did with Citizen’s Bank, for example:

Citizen’s had a problem in Boston. They were dominated in the Boston market by Fleet and Bank of Boston, so they wanted some kind of tie-in with the Celtics to increase their visibility in the area.

Citizen’s flew me to Newport, Rhode Island, where I spoke to several of the bank’s key people. I gave them copies of my third book, Success Is a Choice, so that they could be aware of what was at the core of my philosophy. I also stressed the fact that they could improve their place in the Boston market by identifying with the Celtics, even though the Celtics play in the FleetCenter, a building named after Fleet, one of the largest banks in the region. They signed me to a personal services contract, which included me doing some TV commercials, and we began the partnership between Citizen’s Bank and the Boston Celtics.

When we began, Citizens had an 8 percent name recognition in Boston. In just three months it jumped to 38 percent, and in one year they were regarded as having one of the greatest rises in banking in New England. The Celtics benefited by some clever advertising that helped keep the team in the public eye, something that we always must be trying to do, since we cannot take for granted that people always are thinking of us just because we are the Celtics and have been playing basketball in Boston for over half a century.

This was the start of a great partnership. Citizen’s had great leadership, vision, and they had the banking fundamentals in place; we helped their recognition factor and kept our team out there as well.

Another important thing to remember is the tougher the times the more you have to focus. A leader is never needed more than in times of crisis. History tells us this, from Churchill to Roosevelt, from Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis to Martin Luther King Jr. telling African Americans that he had a dream for them. There is something very comforting about a leader telling us that yes, things are difficult right now, but we’re going to get through them. It’s the essence of leadership, from the great figures of history to parents comforting a young child. The message is the same: We will survive this; things will get better. And the subtle message? During such times it is the leader who is both calm and soothing, the leader who has taken control of the situation. The leader who is going to show us the way.

The more people are losing their heads around you, the more you must keep yours.

When we were going through our adversity with the Celtics in the winter of 1999 I knew that if I got down, or overreacted, then things would have been worse. I knew my team was emotionally fragile, that they weren’t ready to handle the ramifications of their failure; that they needed me to help them navigate their way through it. They were young and many had never gone through this kind of adversity before. Take Antoine Walker, for example: Here’s someone who had been a high school All-American basketball player, had won an NCAA title as a college sophomore, had been an NBA lottery pick shortly after, and had been signed to a seventy-million-dollar contract. And now he was being booed in the FleetCenter every time he missed a shot. Nothing had prepared him for that. Nothing could have prepared him for that.

So my message to him during this difficult stretch was that he had to resort to his fundamentals, concentrate on rebounding and playing better defense, on taking higher percentage shots and doing things to make his teammates better.

That’s what you must stress to the people you are leading. When adversity strikes you must return to your fundamentals. Make it simple. Establish more short-term goals. Rediscover your basics. Do everything you can do to get people to believe again, that these tough times are merely a blip on the radar screen, certainly nothing that’s going to last.

The other thing you must stress to people is that none of us can rest on our laurels. Just as it doesn’t matter to those people booing Antoine Walker in the FleetCenter what his past accomplishments, it also no longer matters what my coaching résumé is either. This is a mistake people make all the time.

Your résumé gets you the job, but that résumé gets filed once you start that job. You might want people to respect your past, to give you some slack because of it. They won’t. That’s just the way it is, both in business and in life. You can say that’s not fair and you may be right. But it’s irrelevant. The only thing that counts is what you do now. Your reputation only means something on Old Timer’s Day.

We all are one-day contracts.

In a sense, I’ve always operated that way. I was born in Manhattan, spent my childhood in Queens, then later lived on Long Island. I’ve always experienced new people and new places. I like going to different places on vacations. I like new challenges, to always be testing myself.

But whether you’re this way or not, rest assured that people always are evaluating you, regardless of what you’ve accomplished in the past. What have you done for me lately? That’s the old cliché, but it’s also true.

We see this in sports all the time. It’s been said that everyone ends up in the transactions section of the sports page sooner or later, even the greats. That’s the record of who was traded, or cut, or waived. In a sense, it’s an athlete’s obituary page, the place where everyone’s career ends. Even the great players get old. Even the great players reach a point when it no longer matters what they did.

That’s a good lesson for all of us, too.

All of us are constantly under a microscope. Have we lost a step? Have we grown lazy? Have we embraced success? Have we lost that eye of the tiger? Have the times passed us by? Not to think that we are being evaluated that way is naive. People are constantly making judgments on us all the time, fairly or unfairly.

That knowledge alone should be enough to make us maintain our focus.

AVOID DISTRACTIONS

Not that this should come as any great surprise, but young people will tend to lose focus very quickly.

They have grown up in an instant gratification culture, one ruled by the television clicker. They have been all but programmed to have short attention spans, courtesy of video games, television, movies, and now the Internet, all of which distract them with special effects and a kind of visual “magic” to which other generations were less exposed. They have come of age in a culture that’s frenetic, constantly bombarded by noise and changing images.

Many kids have played on a variety of youth league teams. They have played for innumerable coaches, who often have coddled them and reinforced the notion that they essentially can do anything they want. Individual stats are very important to them. Individual accomplishments are very important to them, as are individual awards. They also tend to be very sensitive to any kind of criticism. What we might see as coaching, they perceive to be criticism.

Young people also have a difficult time envisioning the future, tending to live only in the present tense, not thinking about consequences. That’s simply a part of being young, the feeling that you are going to be young forever. The future? It might as well be on the other side of the moon as far as they’re concerned. In basketball terms, the next basket, the next game; these are their frames of reference, not any vision of the future. To them, practice is often a burden.

Selflessness, discipline: These often are virtues they don’t have. This is not surprising. They have grown up as the center of their own universes.

Often, the best thing for young people to do is fail. They almost need to go through hardship as part of the maturation process.

It’s like Antoine Walker referring to himself as a veteran All-Star after only being in the NBA two years. Why did he make such a ridiculous statement, one that could come back to haunt him?

Simple.

He’s young. The key is for Antoine not to make the mistake again, not the mistake itself.

Yet it doesn’t do any good for me to say, “I can’t understand how he can say something like that. I just can’t fathom it.” Nor does it do any good for anyone in a leadership position to say they can’t fathom certain behavior from young people.

Well, fathom it.

Because it’s not going away. Young people are going to say inappropriate things. They are going to do things that are misguided, things that make you shake your head and wonder why. They are going to have times when they appear distracted and unfocused. You must understand that and deal with the ramifications. There is absolutely no substitute for experience. Not to recognize that is self-delusion.

We have all seen talented people who never seem to live up to their potential for some reason or the other: the salesman who never seems to live up to the promise of his first years, the gifted athlete whose career seems to plateau. People who have great early success often later fade into oblivion, drifting and moving from one thing to another, seemingly unable to make the kind of commitment necessary for long-term success.

It’s a trait that you often see in people who always seem to be changing careers. Invariably, they start out with good intentions, are enthusiastic about their job, and for a while feed off the momentum caused by that enthusiasm. Then something happens. The newness wears off, their excitement wanes, and their performance starts declining.

This is what happens when you lose focus and it manifests itself in all kinds of ways.

So how do you deal with it?

Let’s take an extreme example:

Let’s say I learn that someone on my staff is having personal problems. Unless I’m asked, this is not something I want to deal with. It’s that person’s business. I do meet the spouses of the people I hire, for I want to know if they are upbeat, positive people. But that’s usually as far as I go. I don’t want to be Big Brother. I don’t want to create an atmosphere where the people who work for me feel I’m being intrusive, crossing boundaries they don’t want me to cross. I don’t want to delve into things that are personal.

So my message to this person who is having personal problems is simple and direct: When you come into the workplace you must leave your personal life behind.

You must come to work and program your mind so that you are focused on the task at hand. This is your responsibility, regardless of what’s going on in your personal life. This is your job and when you’re on the job all your attention, all your energy, must go to that job. Everything else must be blocked out. When you cross those lines it’s all business. That’s what being a professional is all about.

That is what I’m constantly trying to get across to my young team, this concept of what it takes to be a professional. Being a professional basketball player is more than simply getting paid for playing. It’s about being on time. It’s about having a great work ethic. It’s about having a positive attitude. It’s about not quitting when adversity shows up on your doorstep. It’s about having goals, both short-term ones and long-term ones. It’s about being committed to the group of which you are a part.

It’s also what focus is all about.

People must continually be reminded of their fundamentals, the building blocks of what they do. Look at the way a golfer takes practice swings before he actually hits the ball. Sure, some of this is simply loosening up. On a deeper, level, though, it’s an instant refresher course, a quick inventory through the mechanics of a golf swing. A PGA golfer doesn’t just walk up and hit the ball in a big tournament, relying on muscle memory and his natural ability. He is always concerned about his fundamentals, remaining in focus. Basketball players don’t simply walk out of the locker room and begin playing a game. They stretch. They take layups to get loose. They take practice shots in search of a good rhythm. They are constantly rechecking their fundamentals.

It’s a great lesson for all of us.

Another way to maintain focus is to maintain your passion. Passion can make up for a lot of other ills.

People who are passionate about what they do are great to be around. They boost morale, make the workplace a better place to be. In short, they inflate the people around them. Compare them to the people who have no passion, the ones who give off the vibes that work is always some incredible burden.

Negative people suck the air out of everyone around them. Just as a positive attitude rubs off on everyone, so do pessimism and cynicism. These attitudes are morale killers. They affect your organization every day.

As a leader, you always are looking for upbeat, positive people, people who are passionate about what they do.

As the Celtics struggled during the shortened 1999 season the question that I was continually asked was if I regretted leaving Kentucky to come to the Celtics. I had had great success at Kentucky and yet I had chosen to leave all that in the spring of 1997 for the great challenge of trying to rebuild the Celtics. Why wouldn’t I be asked this? And if I wasn’t getting the question, my friends were. The assumption was that since we were struggling I obviously had made a bad decision and that if I could instantly clap my hands and stamp my feet and be back in Kentucky—like some basketball version of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz—I would certainly do it.

That assumption couldn’t be more wrong.

I remember once asking Cawood Leford, the longtime broadcaster of Kentucky basketball games, if he ever thought about how far he’d come from growing up in a small Kentucky town, and he answered by saying, “No, I never do. The time for looking back is when you’re retired sitting on the porch. Then you can look back. Not before.”

I feel the same way.

Throughout my career I have never looked back. I make a decision about the future and I move into it. Yes, there are many cherished memories in the places I’ve been, but this is not the time to dwell on them. What motivates me are challenges and I have a huge one: to try to hang another championship banner in the rafters of the FleetCenter and restore the Celtics to their past glory.

This is what motivates me. It keeps me young. It keeps me wanting to come to work every day. It keeps me squarely in the moment, which is where I want to live. Not in the musty past where you sit alone with your memories, as cherished as they might be. There will be time enough for that. Maintaining my passion for what I do keeps me focused. It keeps me working hard, keeps my discipline. Living in the present tense, consumed with what you’re doing, is what keeps you focused. Regardless of what happens in my career with the Celtics, I see this as a wonderful opportunity.

ALWAYS BE PREPARED

Imagine a professional football team that shows up to play the big game on Sunday afternoon without practicing during the week, the assumption being that simply because the players are going to try hard in the game and do their best to win that that should be enough.

Ridiculous?

Of course. Any coach who did this would be drummed out of the business in a week.

But many people treat their jobs like this, as if they can simply show up and that’s enough.

Being prepared is a big part of being focused.

It’s surprising how many people don’t prepare. They work hard, they’re committed to their jobs, and they care about their performance, yet they don’t do the necessary preparation needed to ensure success, as if they figure they’re either going to get by on their talent alone, or things are somehow simply going to work out. As a leader, you must understand this:

You can never prepare too much.

The people who arrive at the workplace thirty seconds before they’re scheduled to begin work, harried and rushed, have not properly prepared. The boss who walks into the sales meeting without planning what he wants to accomplish during that meeting has not properly prepared. The clothing store that does not have enough sales people on staff has not prepared. These are all examples of forgetting fundamentals and when fundamentals are not constantly reinforced, both people and groups will lose focus.

So much of your success happens before the actual event. It’s the homework you do before the test, the studying you do before the sales presentation, the constant rehearsal before the play opens on Broadway. You see this all the time. The teams that practice well during the week invariably play well on the weekend. The salesman who knows his customers has an edge. The company that knows its market does better than the company that doesn’t. This is common sense.

In the first chapter of this book we discussed beginning to impart your vision in the first chapter, the importance of making a good first impression.

Implicit in that was that I had gone into the first meeting with the Celtics prepared, knowing what I wanted to say, aware of possible questions, emotionally ready to take care of the situation. I had played out this scene endless times in my mind, a way of visualization. There was nothing that could have come up for which I didn’t think I would have been ready. Imagine how different that first meeting can be if you’re not prepared, if you figure you can simply show up and wing it.

That’s why I believe so much in practice.

Most people would be amazed at the amount of preparation we do before every game. We scout the other team. We break down film on them. We know their offensive sets. We know their defensive tendencies. We know their out-of-bounds plays. We break down the individuals on the other team, to the point that we know their games inside and out. Then we provide this information to our players. We go over it. We do everything we can think of to put us in a position to be able to win the game. This happens eighty-two games a year. Our competition does the same thing. Not to guarantee that we are going to win it, understand, but to have a chance to win it.

That is what focus is.

It’s not a luxury. It’s not something you can turn on and off according to your whim. Focus is a necessity, an essential part of the leadership profile.

There always are going to be days when you know your group is going to struggle. Just as individuals are going to have off days, and times when they want to coast, so do groups. That’s when you need focus more than ever.

For example:

I know that during a season there are going to be days in practice when it’s going to be a struggle. It might be because we won a game the night before, and everyone is feeling good about themselves, embracing success. It might be that we’re coming off the road and the guys are tired. Whatever the reason, I know the potential exists for this to be a wasted day, one of those days when everyone seems to simply be going through the motions. This is when the group needs to be reminded of their focus more than ever.

On such days my message to them is that we are going to be here anyway, so why don’t we make the best of it? Why should we be content to simply go through the motions? Why should we just mail in our performance? Why shouldn’t we just work as hard as we can, give the best performance we can, and then we’ll get out of here for the day? On such days I may even make a deal with my players—namely, that if they collectively give a great effort I will shorten practice.

The key is to keep everyone focused as often as possible for focus is what gets you through the tough times. Focus is what keeps everyone pointing to a common goal. Focus is whether your original vision is going to get actualized.

KEY CHAPTER POINTS

• Maintain Discipline Focus is a discipline, just as working hard, and being more organized, and managing your time better, is. It is something at which you can get better. But focus is also very fragile. The tougher the times the more you have to focus. A leader is never more needed than during a crisis. During such times, your message must be that we will survive this. Your overall manner must be telling people that you are in control of the situation.

• Avoid Distractions Young people lose focus very quickly. They also have a difficult time envisioning the future. They are prone to distractions and changing interests, both of which cause them to lose focus on the task at hand. So anything you can do to minimize distractions is a plus. You must constantly be stressing fundamentals and the goals of the group.

• Always Be Prepared Being prepared is an essential part of being focused. The more prepared you are, the less chance you have of getting distracted. So much of success depends on preparation, on what you do before the actual event. Practice is not a luxury, not a penance. It’s a key part of being focused.