Focusing on What Matters
When you take care of your people, everything else falls into place.
Wherever your eyes look, your body will follow. That’s true while driving, hunting, playing baseball, even just walking around. It doesn’t matter how straight you think you’re holding the steering wheel or how perfect your pitching form is, if your focus is on the wrong thing, you’ll drift away from your objective.
That’s true for business, too. A company’s focus determines its outcomes, for better or worse. As Jaynes has grown from a small concrete company to one of the Southwest’s largest and most influential general contractors, we’ve faced plenty of opportunities to be pulled from the path. But we keep our focus by remembering what matters and aligning our teams around processes rather than goals.
Focus on Becoming, Not Achieving
“You don’t get results by focusing on results. You get results by focusing on the actions that produce results.” – Mike Hawkins [1]
It’s easy to get caught up in the race to achieve. Bigger contracts, larger profits, award recognition, fame and acclaim—these are goals many companies set as benchmarks. But achievements are not the same as success, and focusing on them can leave you blinded to the big picture.
If your work is winning awards but your employees are miserable, you’re failing. If you complete a project in record time but the workmanship is lacking, you’ve failed your company and your client. If you focus so closely on the work in front of you, you might miss opportunities and better ways to do things.
There are times we need to be heads-down and laser-focused on the task at hand. But our teams can’t do that if we’re not also doing the head-up work of looking out for our employees’ well-being. As general contractors, it’s our job to see the big picture and coordinate multiple teams of specialists, and we apply that same level of scrutiny to our internal teams and processes as well.
Doing the Right Things Every Day
Goals are important. But when you’re only focused on the bottom line, it’s easy for things to fall out of alignment, for details to be overlooked, and for relationships to suffer.
We believe it’s better to build a foundation of daily actions that drive sustainable results. That means consistently performing excellence, even when no one is watching, even when it would be easier to skip steps or cheaper to cut corners.
We focus on our people by:
- Pairing experienced mentors with new talent, so our experience can carry the next generation of employees even higher.
- Holding tight to our safety standards to ensure every employee returns to their family at the end of the day.
- Aligning the company’s interests with our employees through our employee-owned structure.
- Honing our processes and perpetually learning from our successes and challenges.
- Sharing our wisdom, experience, and processes with others to raise the bar for our industry.
When we create habits that align with our core values and mission, we keep our focus on the actions that lead to success. And when we tend to the details, the big picture takes care of itself. That’s The Jaynes Way.
SOURCE:
[1] Hawkins, M. (2013, July 25). If you expect results, don’t focus on them. Alpine Link.
