Focus on the Little Things And the Big Things Will Take Care of Themselves

By Patswerk

As a leader, it’s easy to devote most of your mental energy to tackling the “big” things: bringing in new clients, money flow, the level of work quality. But as Ben Horowitz, cofounder and partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has discovered in his years advising and investing in startups, focusing on the big things is often actually to your detriment. Without intricate knowledge of what’s going on at the ground level, you can’t effect change.

For example, let’s say you and your team have been finding yourselves struggling to ship projects on schedule. Rather than simply laying out new, stricter expectations for meeting deadlines (which will not only not inspire or motivate your team, but will also not give them clear direction or address any of the issues they might be facing that caused the problem to begin with) start small.

Identify some of the factors that might be causing delays at different milestones along the project path. Is the client not delivering feedback on time? Are there too many needless meetings? Does the group need a more organized communication setup? Based on the insights you glean, make adjustments to the current conditions and take note of how they affect the outcome of shipping on time. Repeat the process until you’ve found winning circumstances, thereby accomplishing the larger goal.

Horowitz suggest getting into the weeds and really understanding that changing the little things is how you make real progress:

If you are worried about the quarter, you might think that it’s a good idea to call your head of sales twice a day to get the status. By doing so, you might think you are creating the appropriate sense of urgency. In reality, you are just distracting her from closing the quarter twice a day. In fact, by radically overemphasizing the quarter, you will likely cause your sales leader to begin focusing on the cover up — the byzantine set of excuses that she will deploy in the case that she actually misses her number….

Similarly, if you are deeply worried about engineering throughput, lamenting that your engineers don’t work as hard as other companies that you’ve heard about will achieve very little other than making your engineers think they are the “B” team. On the other hand, spending time going through their day and really understanding what’s slowing them down in the code base, where their build environment is working against them and how the communication overhead between groups slows them down might help a great deal…

You should set high-level goals, but those goals will or will not be achieved by the organization that you assigned them to. If you want to help them reach their goals, do so by focusing on the little things…. Focus on the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.

By gathering the granular data and learning the intricacies of the situation, you discover the actual mechanics that go into the process of what may seem to be a small task but, in aggregate with other small tasks, adds up to real impact. In so doing, you glean invaluable insights that end up driving progress overall.

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