Focus Glossary

Every department, every team has their own words, every business creates their own language or words.

At Focus we believe in ensuring we speak plainly, directly and have a centralised space to explain our words and the meanings behind it.

Culture

Organisational Culture

The way your business is operating, how the teams speak to each other, how the departments share updates, knowledge and operate togetherundefined

Company Culture: Some organisations have different sub cultures, company culture typically is how one of the businesses within a larger organisation works together, how they operate, how they are guided, how they speak to each

Sub Culture: Your organisation is made up of many spinning wheels, many teams and departments and each components of your business has the way it works, the way it works together. A team can have its own cadence, its own rhythm, its own set of slightly differing rules. Sub culture is what is often missed by execs, HR & People teams as they are disconnected and miss these important nuances.

Want to know more about company culture? Read the Focus detailed explainer of What Company Culture Is?
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Workplace: the office, the work environment, the place of work

Hybrid: A hybrid office a blend of remote workers, a centralised office

Perks: Perks are small items that many businesses think make their teams happy, a ping pong table, a foosball table, free beer and wine, breakfasts served on a Monday. These are typically ways to ensure things happen in the office. Perks can help culture but is not culture.

Organisational Health: Businesses are more than just strategy, more than the numbers you are aiming to hit, organisational health is the traditionally thought of “softer” side of your business, it is most importantly the underlining health of your organisation. The agreements, the disagreements, the guiding principles, the level of trust in your company that will make or break your business performance. A health of an organisation is more than applying a culture community or introducing painstaking OKR’s.

Leadership

Champions: Many businesses struggle to share internal knowledge, there is so much knowledge stored in individuals but it is rarely shared. Champions is a concept that Focus believes in, to share important information, share important insights and importantly champions empower those around them to increase their understanding of complex topics, themes, trends and channels.

Captains: Captains are leaders on the pitches and often off it too, captains are important members of any team and is no different in your workplace. Captains take responsibility to ensure you follow the directions set, take responsibilities and look over and after their team mates and those around them.

Growth: Growth is a new breed of thinking, bringing the best parts of product and marketing together and developing a department to tackle business problems or problems within your funnel by bringing together the right members of your SWAT team, Product, Design, UX, UI, Marketing, technology, development, sales, HR, people, operations.

Principles: Over two decades of professional work, Focus has seen many organisations lose their principles, an agreed guiding set of principles that help guide decision making. Principles should be simple to understand, simple to follow, simple to share with new and returning staff members. A principle should be something as simple as naming convention, the tools the company is to use for what topics. An important example would be subject line principles with .
Project name (client name) + status + clear subject line to understand at a glance

Strategy

Strategy: Strategy to Focus is the plan of action for your business, we like to say think 5 (yes five), plan 3 yes, action 1 year. We recommend you review your strategy twice a year and update and reiterate your strategy as frequently as possible.
Northstar: A northstar is the guiding light for your company to get behind, to guide all decisions & help you question is this action getting us to our ultimate goal aka our north star.

Focus metric = One core metric to focus all other metrics. Focus metric is clearer than a northstar as it is clear why all metrics roll up and into the focus metric.
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Growth Mindset: in the world of business we have those who have a fixed mindset, one that rarely looks to improve. Fixed on we have done that, tried that or that won’t work. A Growth mindset is one that challenges the why, challenges the status quo and dives into learning, teaches others and ensuring you and your company can reimagine and reshape business.

Communications

Inboxes: We have numerous inboxes in our day to day lives, our email, our slack or teams, our Whatsapp, our iMessage, our document notifications. Inboxes are noisy and taking over our professional life, rather than informing us of the most important information.

Unknown Knowns: This is one of those words when you have worked in large orgs you hear regularly but to normal people or inexperienced employees it doesn’t really mean much or explain anything. Unknown knowns are the risk from lack of communication, selfish keeping of information or lack of thought in areas of your business.

Ruthless prioritisation: We are tempted in the business world to mark everything as high priority, we have a list and we either ignore “low” priorities or move everything as high and fail to complete them. Businesses can only operate with three to five high priorities, if you are not ruthless in focusing your business and helping the team to prioritise your teams will not be able to prioritise or know when to ask for help. Ruthless prioritisation is being focused, asking yourself what is most important and continuously prioritising the most important tasks and projects and deleting (with explanation) or delegating to team members or external resource.
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Deep Work: Cal Newport released a seminal book in 2016 concentrated around the requirement for uninterrupted, deep work is a book dedicated to success in a Distracted World. Cal suggests we need dedicated time to concentrate on one important task at a time. Focus is a good supporter of individuals blocking out time, going on DND and diving into Deep Work, this is something you will have to train your colleagues.
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