Taking Back Your Focus: 3 ways to keep your team focused

by Tim Swanson

My friend, Caleb, calls it ‘mission drift’. The other day my dad referred to it as ‘scope sliding’. You’ve probably heard people refer to is as ‘losing focus’. I’ve had very few conversations about this phenomenon as it pertains to working with my teams. But now that I’m more aware of it, I’m realizing it happens all the time. Have you ever sat down in a meeting to talk about one specific thing, and ended up talking about some complete other thing?

In a culture full of people with ADD this happens all the time. The place I see it the most is in staff meetings at Moon Valley Bible Church. It is not uncommon for us to start with a topic (like planning for better Sunday morning services) and end up in another galaxy talking about a completely different topic (like how much work our campus needs to be presentable).

Personally, I am not much of a talker. In fact meetings tend to wear me out. By the time I get to the end of a two hour meeting, I am ready to crawl into bed and call it a day. So when our meetings steer off course and our conversation ends up in the nether regions, it can be anxiety producing.

Fortunately, our staff is made up of a bunch of really flexible people who will snap to it when someone points out that we’re off course. However, I have been on plenty of teams where mission drift derails the entire conversation rendering the planning meeting ineffective. Since meetings are so difficult for me

1. Appoint a meeting facilitator: at MVBC our Executive Pastor does it most of the time. Occasionally he will ask me or one of the other staff member to do it. The trick with this task is to give the conversation the freedom to shift from idea to idea as people are being creative, while not letting things wander completely off topic. When I’m leading, I’ll generally do this by saying something like, “Good idea, however I don’t want to drift too far off topic. Lets jump back over to...”

2. The writing is on the wall: I have seen few things unite a group of people around a topic as a well crafted mission statement. For service planning at Moon Valley Bible Church, our pastor coined the phrase, “So good you want to share it”. When we run programming meetings, we often print the phrase out and post it on the wall. When our focus begins to drift, anyone can say, “how does that help us create a Sunday service that’s so good you want to share it?”

3. Find a diplomatic way to remind people about the topic : Sometimes the topic can get carried away by a team member who is really zealous about something else. When this happens it can be difficult to try to rein everyone back in without squelching the zealous person. This is especially true if you are not in charge of the meeting. So it’ll be important to find the right thing to say. Of course it’s all in how you say it. But I’ve found it helpful to say something like, “I like that idea. But before we dive completely into it, I just want to make sure its more important than what we originally got together to talk about.” Of course you run the risk of everyone wanting to follow the zealous person. But if that’s the case, then it may be time to get on board with everyone else and ditch the topic you originally sat down to talk about.