Sarah Biller has spent 30 years building companies, leading teams, navigating crises. She’s been a CFO, a founder, a venture-backed entrepreneur, and a co-founder of a not-for-profit that works across five continents. When I asked her during our podcast conversation what she wished she’d known at the very start of her leadership journey, she didn’t hesitate.
“Focus is a superpower.”
Period.
No framework. No 10-step list. Just that.
And the moment she said it, I felt it land. Because I hear the opposite every single week in my mentoring work. Leaders who are stretched thin across six priorities. Teams that are running in five directions at once. Tech organizations where everything is urgent, and nothing is actually moving.
This article is the companion to that conversation. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can find it here on the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast. What I want to do now is go deeper: because a superpower this important deserves more than a one-liner.
Why Tech Leaders Lose Focus (And Don’t Notice)
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most leaders don’t realize they’ve lost focus. It happens gradually. A new initiative here. An additional stakeholder meeting there. A request to lead another workstream because “you’re the best person for it.”
Sarah pointed to something that resonated with me deeply: women in leadership especially tend to carry multiple buckets. You’re capable, so you get more. You say yes because you’ve been rewarded for saying yes your whole career. And before you know it, you’re doing five things at 60% instead of one thing at 100%.
But this isn’t just a gender pattern. It’s a leadership pattern. In tech specifically, I see it all the time: the team lead who is still coding, reviewing architecture, running 1:1s, attending the product strategy meetings, and onboarding the new hire simultaneously. The CTO who has their hands in every layer of the org because letting go feels too risky.
The result? Diluted focus gives you diluted results. Always. I wrote that line in my burnout article a few months ago, and I meant every word of it.
Research backs this up. A study from the University of California Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully return to a task after an interruption. Multiply that by the average number of context switches a tech leader experiences in a day and you’ll understand why nothing strategic ever gets done.
Focus Isn’t Just About Time. It’s a Leadership Signal.
This is the part most productivity advice misses.
When you, as a leader, spread yourself across everything, you’re not just hurting your own output. You’re sending a message to your team about what “good” looks like. You’re modeling that being everywhere at once is the expectation. That saying no isn’t allowed. That prioritization is a weakness, not a skill.
Sarah talked about this beautifully when we discussed role modeling. The leaders she most admired were clear on what mattered, and they protected that clarity fiercely. Her early mentor, a CTO who could spot an error in a 3,000-line spreadsheet in ten seconds, wasn’t impressive because he was fast. He was impressive because he was focused enough to see what others missed.
Your team watches what you do. They replicate your patterns, not your advice. If you want a team that can concentrate, ship with quality, and do deep work, you have to show them what that looks like. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the leader as a role model in the CQ Leadership Method.
The Three Focus Traps That Catch Leaders Off Guard
From my coaching practice and from conversations like the one with Sarah, I’ve identified three patterns that kill focus in tech leaders specifically.
Trap #1: The Urgency Addiction
Everything feels urgent. Slack pings. Production incidents. The executive deck is needed for tomorrow. When urgency runs your day, focus becomes a luxury you never get to. But here’s what I want you to sit with: not everything that feels urgent is important. And the things that are actually important, strategy, team development, and communication, rarely announce themselves with a red notification badge.
If you haven’t looked at your time through the Eisenhower lens recently (urgent vs. important), I’d encourage you to start there. It’s a simple grid, and it will show you exactly where your focus is leaking.
Trap #2: The Availability Trap
Tech leaders are expected to be reachable. Always. The result is a workday full of micro-interruptions that make sustained thinking nearly impossible. Research from Microsoft’s WorkLab has consistently shown that knowledge workers lose significant amounts of deep-focus time to meetings and interruptions; and tech leaders are among the worst affected.
In my article on getting your time back, I talked about this at length. The culture of immediate availability is not a feature of good leadership. It’s a bug. And it’s costing your team more than you think.
Trap #3: The More-Is-More Illusion
There’s a deeply embedded belief in tech organizations that doing more signals competence. More features, more projects, more visibility, more output. It’s a holdover from individual contributor life, where delivery was the currency.
But leadership isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the right things well. As Sarah reminded me: the best teams feel the urgency and the accountability to deliver, but that urgency is balanced with perspective. That’s what focus actually looks like at the leadership level: not paralysis, not over-extension, but deliberate, committed direction.
What Focus Actually Looks Like in Practice
I want to be concrete here, because “just focus more” is about as useful as “just communicate better.”
Sarah shared something her team does that I found genuinely useful: every Monday, team members bring one fact they learned the previous week that they don’t think their colleagues know. It’s a small ritual. It takes 10 minutes. But it sends a clear signal that learning: real, curious, expansive learning, is a priority here. Not a nice-to-have. A practice.
That’s a form of focused investment. Not in the sprint. In the people running the sprint.
Here are three things I’d encourage you to try:
- Name your top 3. Not your top 10. Not your OKRs with 8 sub-points. What are the three things that, if done well this quarter, would make everything else easier or irrelevant? Write them down. Review them weekly. Every request that lands on your desk gets filtered through that list.
- Protect your deep work blocks. Minimum 90 minutes, no interruptions, recurring in your calendar. Not a meeting-free “maybe” slot: an actual block with a clear purpose. I wrote about this in my time management article; the calendar is a source of power, not a thing you’re enslaved to.
- Make focus a team conversation. Ask your team: “What are we actually working towards right now?” If you get five different answers, you don’t have a team problem. You have a focus problem, and it starts with you. Communication debt often begins with unclarity at the top.
The Crisis Test
We also talked in the podcast about leading through crisis, and this is where the focus conversation becomes most important. Because in a crisis, everything screams for your attention simultaneously. The temptation is to scatter.
Sarah’s perspective was clear: in crisis, the best technology leaders use their skills to move strategic objectives forward, but they stay anchored to a value system. They keep their true north. That is a form of radical focus. Not ignoring what’s happening. But not letting the noise collapse in your direction either.
In my work with IT leaders, I see that the ones who navigate crisis best are the ones who’ve already built the habit of focus before the crisis hits. They know what matters. They know their team. They have the communication contracts in place so they don’t have to rebuild trust from scratch when things fall apart.
Crisis doesn’t create focus. It reveals whether you had it all along.
One More Thing Sarah Said
Toward the end of our conversation, she recommended the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. The principle that stuck with her: just be 1% better every day.
I love this because it reframes focus as a habit, not a heroic act. You don’t have to overhaul everything tomorrow. You just have to ask: what is the one thing I will be more intentional about this week?
For some of you, that’s blocking your calendar. For others, it’s finally saying no to the project that’s been silently draining you for six months. For others still, it’s having the honest conversation with your team about what actually matters right now.
Focus is not a productivity trick. It’s a leadership stance. And according to someone who’s been building things for 30 years: it might be the most powerful one you have.
What is one thing you could stop doing this week to create space for what actually matters?
If this landed for you, I’d love to hear about it. You can always find more on the lemanskills.com blog, sign up for the Leman Leadership Pulse newsletter, or reach out directly. We’re in this together.
